


Operation: Miracle Prawn

by FunkyMeihem



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Baby, Babyfic, F/M, Meihem - Freeform, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, junkmei, meirat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:15:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23380771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FunkyMeihem/pseuds/FunkyMeihem
Summary: Putting all the 'Miracle Prawn' stories together: Mei receives some unexpected news, and she and Junkrat decide on some large changes in their future. Meanwhile, Roadhog is faced with the memories of large changes in his past. How are the three of them supposed to handle a BABY?
Relationships: Junkrat | Jamison Fawkes & Mei-Ling Zhou, Junkrat | Jamison Fawkes/Mei-Ling Zhou
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> (It may seem strange after writing so much about it, but this is not actually my personal headcanon. My personal headcanon is that both Junkrat and Mei are unable to conceive. I like to think that they actually come to terms with that, eventually. If you like, please go check out 'The Birds and The Bees' story for my 'canon' version. But fanfiction is for imagining crazy scenarios and I had quite a few requests for this specific subject! You all wanted some babyfics? So here you go!)

“Mei? Did you hear me?”  
  
There wasn’t much to stare at, so Mei stared at the one thing that was there; a single clock on the wall, watching with a blank gaze at the black numbers on the stark white circle. The thin red line of the second-counter slowly ticked away, moving steadily with its little mechanized jerky movement, clicking one spot over in timely precision. It was odd, still having an analog clock in this day and age. Perhaps Dr. Ziegler was comforted by its irritating ticking, somehow? That ceaseless, echoing ticking, where she could hear the turning and clacking of every gear in the machine’s guts, somewhere behind that clean white and black face. She stared at the clock and she listened to it tick, and watched the red hand go the entire way around, from 12 to 12 again.  
  
Dr. Ziegler tried again after a minute had gone by, biting her lip a little as the smaller woman stared blankly at the clock on the wall above, seemingly uncomprehending. “Mei? Mei-Ling, I know this is a lot to take in…”  
  
Mei shuddered a little on the examination table. She was used to the cold, more than anyone, but the thin little paper medical gowns offered no protection from the deathly chill of the clinic. She wished she had her thermal gear and her furs, like when she was trapped in the wastelands of Antarctica. True, she had lost almost ten years of her life, been the sole survivor of her entire expedition, and had traipsed across miles of unforgiving ice with no food and few supplies; but as she shivered beneath her little paper dress, she wondered if Antarctica had actually been warmer.  
  
Dr. Ziegler was talking again, over the ticking of the clock. “Ah, I see. If you need another minute, I can step out-”  
  
Mei felt herself lifting a hand to try and signal her to stay, trying to fight her way back to the present. The open folder with the little scattering of papers was still open on her lap, though all the letters jumbled together. Licking her lips, she tried to speak, a little wheezing noise hissing out before she managed to wrangle any words. “No! No, I’m…I’m sorry. Sorry, Dr. Ziegler. I d-don’t know what came over me. It…I just..”  
  
A gentle, calming hand (though covered in rubber and colder than ice) was laid upon her shoulder. “Just take a moment, breathe.”  
  
She tried to breathe, and the cold air burned her lungs. “Nn..”  
  
“It’s all right. I must admit I was….surprised, myself. And I assure you, I double checked, and then triple checked. That’s why I called you in for the tests today, just to be completely sure. I didn’t want to say anything until I was certain but…Well, now I am certain. Your results just came back and…They are positive, Mei.”  
  
She shook her head, because the results couldn’t be positive. The doctor had just made a mistake, that was all. “B-but…but I’m not…”  
  
“They all came back positive. You’re about four weeks pregnant.”  
  
“…No, I’m not…”  
  
“Well you were about three weeks when you first came in for your regular check-up, but the hormone levels threw me off and I wanted to run some more tests. I even thought the machine might have been broken. But no, all results positive.” Dr. Ziegler kept talking, even if she shouldn’t have been. Because she was wrong. “I know that…it’s a lot to take in. When you’re ready, we’ll start to go over the procedures and new medical schedule you’ll be on. I do apologize for the frequency, but I’ll need to keep a very close eye on things. The odds are-”  
  
“I’m not pregnant,” Mei said again, looking up a little more desperately. “I can’t be. You said so, yourself. You said so.”  
  
“I…believe the odds I gave you were a little less than one percent…And it seems that one of your tries has hit the mark in that less than one percent range.”  
  
“Tries? But we weren’t…No, we weren’t trying?” Mei held her forehead, still trying to process everything. They hadn’t been trying for a baby at all. After all, they were both quite nearly sterile. Dr. Ziegler’s own tests had confirmed it. Mei’s emergency cryostasis had killed her eggs, and Jamison’s sperm was non-viable from his lifelong endurance of radiation. Of course, that hadn’t discouraged his libido. Especially after it was confirmed that they needn’t bother with contraceptives, she had lost count of the times she’d been intimate with the insatiable junker…and she did mean insatiable. He was always ravenous for more, and often came to her multiple times a day. Most often, she had obliged him. She’d ‘obliged’ him many, many times.  
  
Could it be? After so many months and countless ‘tries’ together, had there been some stray wandering sperm that had actually managed to find a lonely stray egg? Was it possible?  
  
Angela nodded gently, her fingers tightening very softly on Mei’s shoulder to try and focus her attention. “Just take whatever time you need. May I assume that you will want to tell the father in person, or do you want me to call him in?”  
  
“N-no. I’m sorry. I’ll tell him. I think I just need to calm down a little. Can I put my things back on and go clear my head?”  
  
“Of course. I’ll call you in a few hours, all right? Let me know if you need help with telling him, or anything else.”  
  
“Mm.”  
  
Angela left the room, and Mei began pulling on her clothes again. Her head was still spinning and as she pulled on her sweater, she looked down at her stomach slowly and then reached for her coat as well, shrugging it on and zipping it up as she rested both hands on her belly. It was always too cold in this clinic. Couldn’t let the baby get cold.  
  
…The baby…  
  
She had always thought she would make a good mother. Even before she had left for her ill-fated expedition, she had made plans that included little sons or daughters one day. She’d wanted to meet someone nice and settle down with him, and have two or three children in quick succession. They would have grown up together, with lots of toys about science to peak their curiosities, sports to keep them all healthy, and candy as a ‘sometimes’ treat. And she and her husband would attend every play and pageant, every practice, every recital, and they’d love and support one another as they grew up together. She’d wanted a family.  
  
Of course, that hadn’t happened. She had been locked out from nine years of her own life, had nearly died while trying to save herself, and her insides had been left ravaged and her hopes of a family dashed to pieces. And then she had not fallen for a responsible family-oriented fellow scientist as planned, but had instead (against all odds and against all better judgments) fallen in with an explosives-obsessed radiation-addled Australian junker whose only family was a pig-masked bodyguard and mercenary killer. They were the two that she had made into a sort of misfit kind of family for her. The kind of family with less piano recitals and soccer matches, and more random explosions and hunting down enemy Talon agents. They were going to make a new, strange, good life together, her and a man who called himself Junkrat. And now that was (again, against all odds) the man who had fathered an impossible baby inside her.  
  
How the hell was she supposed to tell him?…

* * *

  
  
  
“Oi Roadie, can you loan me your communicator?”  
  
“Why?”  
  
The two junkers were lingering in the cafeteria again. Junkrat had, as usual, inhaled his meal within a minute, and impatiently waited for his bodyguard to finish the massive amount of plates still in front of him. Roadhog seemed more interested in his honey garlic shrimp than his employer, even when the latter made a face and stuck his tongue out at the little orange-pink creatures scattered across the bed of rice.  
  
“Ugh! Never liked prawns, or shrimp. Creepy little squiggly things with weird sharp faces, that’s what they are.”  
  
“…Kind of like you.”  
  
“Fuck you, Roadie. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, give me your comm. I need it to call Mei!” He reached across with one long arm, trying to snag the communicator by the pig-masked man’s ear. “Just hand it here, would ya?”  
  
Roadhog leaned back out of range. “Use your own.”  
  
“I tried! S’weird, I think it’s not working right. She called me three times, didn’t leave a message. Then she called again, and I was there to pick up, but then she just kinda breathed into the phone, made a weird noise, and it hung up. So I tried calling her back a few times and she didn’t pick up. Think maybe the comm’s busted. Let me use yours!”  
  
“If your’s isn’t blinking red, it’s not busted.”  
  
“Then what’s the deal with Mei, d’you think? Never took her for the ‘heavy breathing over the phone’ sort of gal. That’s really more your kind of a gig.”  
  
Roadhog shrugged with a forkful of shrimp halfway to his jaws. “Hm. Doesn’t seem right.”  
  
“Yeh! I know she’s there, but she’s acting all squirrely. And usually you know how she is on the phone. Always picks it up within three rings, sits up straight, speaks real prim and polite and proper, it’s adorable.” He straightened up, pinky stuck out by his communicator by his ear, raising his voice in a poor falsetto of Mei’s accent. “Mei-Ling Zhou speaking!”  
  
“Should just go find her, then.” Roadhog said.  
  
“You just saying that because she’s not acting right, or because you just want to eat your gross-arse shrimps alone?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Grumbling, Junkrat lifted from his seat and purposefully left behind his own mess of plates for Roadhog to clean up, ignoring his bodyguard’s warning rumbles as he hobbled off. Shrimp or prawns or xiā or whatever anyone called those little things, he was simply not a fan. He exited the cafeteria before any hooks could be flung his way, his peg clacking noisily down the hall as he skulked off towards the direction of the dorms. Pounding on the door of Mei’s room, he received no answer. He tried the communicator yet again, and still no answer. Was she in a meeting, maybe? Maybe at another of her appointments at Mercy’s clinic? She wasn’t due out for any missions, he knew, so she had to be somewhere.  
  
The meeting room was empty. And the library. And the entertainment room was not empty, but had that creepy African omnic horse-lady-thing hanging about inside instead of Mei, and he was none too keen on sticking around anything omnic, especially horse-lady-things. Everywhere he tried was empty, and when he knocked on the door of Mercy’s clinic, she gave him a very strange look when he asked if she’d seen Mei. She’d said that she hadn’t seen her since that morning, but urged him to try and contact her quickly, and then quickly excused herself.  
  
He was traveling from clinic towards the practice grounds, when he spotted movement up on top of one of the towers over by the cliffs, by one of the old satellite comm discs. Squinting, he was fairly sure he saw a dark head of hair, and a little flash of color that might have been a red-beaded pin with a rhinestone snowflake. Brightening, he quickened his limping gait across the pavement, metal peg clacking noisily as he stood at bottom of the stairs.  
  
“Mei! Is that you, babe?” he called.  
  
“Jamie?” she called back, sounding a bit surprised. “What are you doing out here?”  
  
“Looking for you, obviously!” He started up after her, poking his head out to see her sitting by herself on a beach blanket out in the sun. “Hey! You sunbathing? Make room for a rat! I’m real good at sunbathing, got lots of tips for ya. Now you’re gonna want a nice, even, all-over tan. So, topless sunbathing’s the way to go-”  
  
“Jamie.”  
  
“Take it from me, sun-baked tits are some of the nicest-”  
  
“Jamie!”  
  
“Got a nice sun-baked pair on me, meself! One time I was in Sydney-”  
  
“JAMIE!”  
  
He blinked and looked at her. She didn’t really seem to be in the proper, relaxed state of mind required for topless sunbathing, not at all. She looked fretful and a little drained. Screwing his face up to one side, he squinted and sat down on the blanket a little more quietly. “Not really sunbathing at all, were you?”  
  
“Sorry. I was going to call you later. Again.”  
  
“Was your comm busted? Thought mine was, but Roadie wouldn’t loan me his, so I went looking for you. Looked everywhere, actually. What’re you doing all the way out here by yourself? You in some kind of thinking funk again? I know how you get stuck in the muck sometimes, eh? Well, your favorite rat’s here for you now, darl!”  
  
She managed a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Well, I guess since you’re here now, there’s no getting around it. I think…we need to talk about something, Jamison.”  
  
“Sure! What are we talkin’ about, again?”  
  
“Okay…I’ve been going through this in my head over and over again, trying to think how to tell you. And I still don’t think I’ve decided on anything so, I just don’t know what to do. So…I’m just going to tell you, okay? So please just…Okay, I’m going to tell you…” She took a deep breath…and then continued blabbering on despite her best efforts. “Just give me a second, okay? I was going to call you but then I couldn’t, and then I thought maybe we should meet at the clinic, but it’s so cold in there, and it’s a lot to-”  
  
One long, lanky arm snaked around her abruptly, scooting her across the blanket and up against his side. “Think I might have been a bad influence on you. I’m normally the one with the mouth going off before the rest of me. Take a breath, c’mon, just say it, spit it out.”  
  
“Okay, I went to see Dr. Ziegler today. I-it’s been confirmed and…uh, four weeks…I-I’m…”  
  
“C’mon.”  
  
“Jamie, she says I’m pregnant.”  
  
He froze beside her, every usually twitching muscle going stone still. Very, very slowly, he turned to look at her, his face shadowed from the sun and his yellow eyes practically glowing. She couldn’t place the tone of his voice at all. “…What?”  
  
She took a breath. “I’m pregnant.”  
  
“…No you’re not.” He looked down at her stomach like it was about to bite him, lifting a hand, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. “…You having a go at me, Mei?”  
  
She was almost relieved at his trepidation. It had been much the same as her own strange wariness, and she had been afraid that he would be as enthusiastic about it as he was about other things, with hooting and hollering and far too much celebration for something she hadn’t even fully accepted yet. Instead he sat there with doubt and surprise, repeating the same words she had said earlier. ‘No you’re not’. No, you can’t be pregnant. She couldn’t be pregnant. THEY couldn’t be pregnant. Not them.  
  
“S-she said that the odds were less than 1 percent…but we somehow hit that one percent together. It’s about four weeks.”  
  
“But my balls are no good. And you got bad eggs. I mean, we can’t…”  
  
“We could. Just, less than one percent. And…we did. I’m about four weeks in. I mean, it’s not quite a baby-”  
  
His eyes darted down at the word ‘baby’ again, looking down at her belly. It wasn’t swollen at all, and he had trouble imagining something like a human baby in there. He’d seen pictures of babies before they were babies. Ugly little things, they were, like a prawn, or a shrimp. Like the honey garlic shrimp that Roadhog had been eating for lunch earlier, one of those shrimp, floating around somewhere in what should have been a barren womb.  
  
He listed his mechanical fingers to his head, pulling at his hair. “No. Fuck…Fuck, can’t be. Tell her to test again-”  
  
“She checked and re-checked again. She didn’t believe it at first, either.”  
  
“Well she’s wrong. Fuck me, she’s the one who said we were both bodgy on the inside! She’s the one who said-”  
  
“Less than one percent chance, Jamison…”  
  
“Uh…Are we sure…it’s mine?…”  
  
She didn’t bother with an answer to that one.  
  
He put his face in his hands, mumbling expletives and something about shrimp to himself. Mei waited patiently beside him, wrapping her arms around her knees and rocking back and forth slowly as she waited for the junker to gather himself. And finally he did, peeking one eye out between his fingers. “What do we do, Mei?”  
  
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I only found out this morning.”  
  
“Is it…I mean, do we know it’s good?” His voice sounded surprisingly small.  
  
“What do you mean, good?”  
  
“I mean…four limbs, two eyes, two ears, a nose, does it have everything? Is it okay in the brain? It’s not like me? I mean, if it’s from me-”  
  
She seemed surprised, then a little stern, pulling herself in against his bony ribs and staying there. “No, Jamie, I don’t want you to think like that. It’s not like that.”  
  
“It might be like that,” he said. “Mei, you’ve never seen junker babies. They’re not good. The radiation’s no good for babies. Even if you can have them, and there’s not many, they’re not…they’re not always right. It does stuff to ‘em.”  
  
He gave her a rather haunted look. There had been very few pregnancies in Junkertown, and news always spread like wildfire when a woman’s belly started to grow. But, news would also spread like wildfire when it was ‘just like the others’. A lot of times they’d just be tiny premature stillborns, dead before they could live. Other times they would come out withered and malformed from the poisons in their air and water. And few junker women had the resources or the werewithal to try and raise an unhealthy baby. He’d seen one of them dead once, abandoned out in the lonely desert; a dried husk of what should have been a baby, with its fingers fused together, extra limbs twisted around where its legs should have been, and its sunken eyes the size of grapefruits, too big for its skull.  
  
He usually put such things out of his mind. Not like he was ever going to have a baby, after all…  
  
“I think it’s too early to tell?” she said. “It’s not really anything yet, at four weeks.”  
  
“A lil’ shrimp…” he muttered, looking to her belly again.  
  
“Not even a shrimp,” she confirmed, even if she thought the comparison a little odd. “I guess we just…I’m not sure what we want to do? This changes a lot of things.”  
  
“If it’s not a good one, you gotta tell the doc to do something. S’not right, makin’ a baby live like that…” His gaze had gone far-off again, and she could tell that whatever he was thinking of, it was bothering him. “Heh. Figures…Everything I make, it breaks apart eventually, eh?”  
  
“Jamison, it might be fine. I’m not sure what you’re thinking, but it’s not like that. It might be good. This isn’t Junkertown,” she said gently. “Dr. Ziegler and I have already talked about all the medical schedules we’ll need, to make sure everything is good and that she’s healthy.”  
  
His head darted up abruptly at that. “She?”  
  
“No! No, no,” she said quickly, waving both hands. “I mean, um..Oh, that just came out. It’s too early to be anything yet. I just kind of said it. I mean…It would be okay, wouldn’t it? If it was a she?”  
  
His eyes widened down at her. “A little girl? Okay? What kind of a question is that? Of course it would be okay. But…it can’t be like me. It’s gotta be like you. A little baby version of my Mei running around, that’s more than okay. She needs to look just like you though. Gotta be real smart like you, too. Hell, there should be as many little Meis as possible, a whole army of them!”  
  
“An army? Oh, um…Let’s slow down a bit, there. That might be too many. Besides…She might look like you,” Mei pointed out, the edges of her lips turning up in a little smile. “I’ve always liked your eyes, she might have your eyes?”  
  
He paused at that. Slowly, the twisted husk in his mind’s eye shifted and changed, first to the honey garlic shrimp from Roadhog’s plate, and then it grew; with all four limbs, two ears, a nose, and two eyes…his eyes. A pair of orange-yellow eyes, on a pair of fat little cheeks that looked more like Mei’s than his. Maybe a little girl with his eyes would be okay, although she still looked more like her mother. Maybe she’d have his hair too? Or his freckles? Or what if it was a boy? A little boy that looked like him or Mei would be fine too. He grew up scrawny and scrangly, so that was what he imagined. A little boy with band-aids on his knees and tape around his glasses…glasses over dark eyes like Mei’s.  
  
But they had to be healthy, they had to be whole. They couldn’t be like the broken things he was used to. They had to be…good…Like their mom. And maybe, just maybe, a little like him? Mei said she’d wanted the baby to have his eyes, after all. Maybe they could be like him, and still be good. Maybe it would all be all right, if they were careful.  
  
“D’ya think…I mean, can we be sure they’d be all right?” He asked cautiously, trying not to let the little pictures in his mind turn back into the radiation-poisoned husks he’d seen before. “Heh. I said they. Like, more’n one.”  
  
“We have one of the best doctors in the world here. I think that would be okay?” She said a little more quickly than she’d meant, and shied away a little when he looked at her. “I mean…A boy or a girl would be fine. Or both. Or having more than one. I always used to imagine I’d have both, so I’m good with either. Or both. Especially both? I haven’t really thought about it in such a long time, having kids. I thought I just couldn’t, and that was that…”  
  
“Thought I couldn’t too. I mean, not just my bodgy balls, but finding someone who’d put up with me, eh? Plus, never thought I’d be a good dad. I didn’t have a dad and then there’s the way I am, and just I mean…me? I couldn’t…can’t…be a dad?”  
  
She rested her cheek against his sunburnt shoulder, the tips of her hair tickling his arm. “Well, I guess we were both wrong?”  
  
He was still having trouble grasping the concept of the whole ‘baby’ thing, much less his ‘baby’ thing. Of course, that meant he would be a father. And that whole idea still seemed pretty damn preposterous, him being a dad. He was pretty sure he was in his mid-twenties somewhere, so that part wasn’t the issue. But the radiation had eaten away bits of his mind and his memory, he had a love of pyrotechnics that nobody else understood, and only a few short years ago he had torn a path of destruction and chaos across multiple countries in a crime spree that had landed him on the telly the world over. What sort of dad was that to a baby? Couldn’t bring a baby on a heist, could you? Babies meant lots of screaming, crying, pooping, laughing, changing nappies…  
  
Although, he was honestly used to pretty much all of that, really…except maybe the nappy-changing. And he would have to change a lot of things, not just nappies. Everything would change, especially how things were with him and Mei.  
  
“It’s kind of overwhelming, isn’t it?” Mei murmured next to him. “I thought maybe Dr. Ziegler had just found an abnormality a few hours ago…and it turned out to be a baby?”  
  
“That’s a pretty big kind of an abnormality, lovey. We…We can keep it, though? Yeh?”  
  
“Well…I want to. And I think you want to? Don’t you?”  
  
“Yeh, I want to. If it’s a good one, and it’s gonna be a good one. But, what do we do with them? I dunno how to be a dad to anyone.”  
  
“Well, I’ve never been a mother before…but I always wanted to be,” she said, and there was a little glow her cheeks, and her smile seemed more steady. “It’s not like we’re teenagers or anything. I mean you’re in your twenties and I’m…I’m still technically, sort of barely thirty-one? In a way, right? That’s okay, I think. And we’ll have lots of help here, with doctors and friends, and we can always ask questions to Ana or Torbjorn or-”  
  
“Wait! You’re right, we can. Doesn’t that little man have like eighty-seven children? He’s got to know everything there is to know about raisin’ babies! And yeah, Nan will know everything too. She’s aces, bet she knows twenty different ways to change a nappy on the battlefield…Although I guess you won’t be out on the battlefield for a while.” Very hesitantly, he reached out a large, broad black-nailed hand, looking to Mei as if for permission. After he received a little encouraging nod, he went to place it on her stomach. Strange, it didn’t feel very different to him at all. “Gotta keep our little prawn safe in there.”  
  
“I thought you didn’t like prawns? They scare you?” She teased.  
  
“They do. And I gotta say, I am fuckin’ terrified of this one in particular,” he said, rubbing his palm over her belly. “Oi, that’s what I’m gonna call this whole thing! Operation: Miracle Prawn.”  
  
“Please don’t.”  
  
“Too late, it’s official. Besides…We got to go talk to Doc Angelface and make sure everything’s apples with you on the insides. D’you even realize how strong n’ smart this one’s gonna be, darl? Just think how fuckin’ determined this baby is to get born, beating those less than one percent odds? That right there, that’s from me, that’s junker determination. Or I guess that might be from you too, that will to survive against anything what comes at us? And with our combined smarts? Fucking hell, Mei, this baby’s going to rule the world.”  
  
“I guess I never thought about it that way. Maybe she…or he…maybe they really do want to be born that badly. I’m still not calling it ‘Operation: Miracle Prawn’, though.”  
  
“You’ll come around.”  
  
His lips pressed to the top of her head, and his prior fear and wariness seemed to have mostly abated, though his hand on her belly was shaking a bit. “Arright. Like I said, we gotta go check in with Doc Angelface, and then Hog, and then Hana and Lucio, and then everybody else on the whole base. And then probably the world. And then I guess I got to read up on baby things because if I think about it any I think I’m just about ready to chunder everywhere, so I’m not gonna think about it right now. In fact, right now…I’m thinking of something else?” His hand on her belly rubbed in wider circles, until it started to slip downward, his lithe fingers sliding into the top of her pants.  
  
She hadn’t quite been expecting that, eyes widening. “Jamison!”  
  
He hauled himself on top of her, tilting his lower body to keep his weight off her stomach. “At some point I’m gonna have to stop rootin’ you. Because of the baby and all, gotta take good care of the baby. So we gotta get lots of prime ‘us’ time in while we can. And before we go to the doc’s, there’s nothing I want more than to root you silly. Again. Let’s put another baby in there, make it twins.”  
  
“That’s not how it works!” she protested, even as her arms looped around his bony shoulders.  
  
“I’ll show you how it works,” he replied, already starting to peel the bottom of her shirt upward, pausing to rest a broad palm across her stomach. “Can’t believe it. Still can’t believe it. Probably won’t really believe it until you’re getting all big, heh. Less than one percent, eh? Heh, not for my girl and the little junker inside her! And all the ones after that! Operation: Miracle Prawn is officially a go!”

He grinned when he saw she was about to give him another earbashing about the name, and smothered her words with his lips instead.


	2. Chapter 2

Roadhog dreamed of sand and fire, and swimming in a giant jar of pickle juice in the middle of the end of the world. Dreams were strange things. Probably shouldn’t have tried to take a nap while he was hungry. But then, he was often hungry and often tired. Inside his dream, a gigantic metal hand with a grinning mouth on its palm started banging on the glass of the jar, and it sent shockwaves through his brine aquarium and disturbed the pickles, sending them scattering. Damnit. He’d wanted to eat one of those-  
  
“Roadie! Roadie, wake your big arse up! I’ll fuckin’ blow up your bed if I got to! Again!” Junkrat’s metal fist was banging dents into Hog’s bedroom door, although there was a little commotion a moment later and what sounded like Mei scolding and trying to drag him away. Still, he was yelling. “Swear it, mate, get up! There’s an emergency!”  
  
“Don’t tell him that!” Mei’s voice protested. “It’s not an emergency!”  
  
Roadhog groaned as his afternoon nap was interrupted yet again, peeling away the oxygen tubes from his face and soon replacing it with the trusted leather pig mask. Grumbling and scratching at where his overalls nearly sagged off his rear, he lumbered to his door and slowly opened it, looking down into Junkrat’s wildly grinning face and Mei’s embarrassed one.  
  
“Hrrghm?” he said, squinting down at them.  
  
“You’re never gonna guess it. Never ever. Try it, though! Heh, guess what! Guess!” The younger junker giggled wildly into both hands, and Roadhog waited for a few seconds, knowing Junkrat would never give him the time to actually guess. A moment later, Rat burst into wild laughter and pulled Mei up against him, all gleaming eyes and teeth and joy. “I told you you’d never fucking guess! Guess who’s got two thumbs and the most viable sperm this side of the Outback! This bloke, right here!” He jabbed both thumbs towards himself proudly, still beaming.  
  
Mei covered her face briefly, turning pink.  
  
Roadhog paused as he processed that one, then suddenly leaned very heavily on the door, head tilting down towards them. “Hgghrrrm?” he asked, lifting his chin towards Mei.  
  
She looked up at him, smiling sheepishly. “Only four weeks, I found out this morning. But he wanted you to be the first one we told.”  
  
Junkrat wrapped his arms around her and smashed his cheek into the top of her head adoringly, messing up her bun yet again. “You’re gonna be an Uncle Roadhog! Think of that! I know that wasn’t part of our contract, but I’m sure we can work in a new clause. For _family_ , after all!”  
  
She coughed a little, but she was still smiling rather uncontrollably, cheeks fully dimpled. “He’s…still excited. We both are. I mean, we’re excited but also terrified. A lot terrified, actually. But also excited. But terrified. But also-”  
  
“Is it good?” Roadhog asked suddenly, and she could feel his gaze piercing through her even from behind his glass lenses.  
  
There was that question again…  
  
Mei’s brows knitted as she looked between the two junkers, and wondered precisely just how bad it had been, what they had seen in wastelands of the poisoned Outback environment. What had happened to those babies, where they were from? That had been both of their immediate reactions, was to assume the worst. She could feel herself start to deflate a little, but Junkrat uncoiled from his serpent-like grip around her and faced down his larger partner, hands on his bony hips. “Damned right it’s a good one, mate! Gonna have all its limbs, two eyes, a nose, all its teeth, all the right sizes, no extras! My own l’il prawn, s’gonna look just like me, and just like Mei too!”  
  
He looked over to Mei again, and cocked his head slowly. “Mm. Hope it’s good.”  
  
“Yeah! We got us a real doc, not a junk clinic butcher. None of that slapping metal bits on if it’s missin’ them. Doc Angelface will know what to do if it starts breaking. Which it won’t! S’gonna be good, parts-wise, brain-wise, all that, you’ll see.”  
  
“…Okay…” Hog said, seemingly unconvinced.  
  
She squinted between them. She could understand nervousness, but…What sort of way was that to greet the news of a baby? Junkrat’s enthusiasm on the subject hadn’t waned, at least, but even he had taken no small amount of convincing that the baby was ‘good’ and wasn’t ‘broken’. On some level, she would never be able to understand the junkers and their way of seeing the world; from out of a desert where parts were expensive and life was cheap, and the news of a new life coming into the world wasn’t met with just trepidation, but genuine dread that a life might end up being worse than death.  
  
She deflated just a bit, and Junkrat wrapped both bony arms around her so she didn’t droop. Holding her against his chest, his manic energy was still running wild and he could not stop himself from rocking back and forth from foot peg, and rocking the girl in his arms with him. Back and forth, side to side. “Fuck’s sake, mate, give my girl a congrats at least! Congratulate me too! Gonna have a whole litter of little rats, me n’ her!”  
  
Frankly, a litter of tiny Junkrats sounded positively nightmarish to Roadhog, and judging by the look on her face, to Mei too. Still, he shook his head and reached down to place one massive hand on her head, lifting it carefully up and down to pat her.  
  
“Congratulations,” he said, “Sorry it’s this one’s.”  
  
Junkrat beamed and enveloped her further into his arms’ serpentine grip. “Piss off, Roadie! Er well, don’t actually piss off, might need you to watch the anklebiters at some point. Say, d’you know much of anything about kids? Heh! Stupid question, ain’t it? Asking the One-Man Apocalypse if he knows anything about baby-rearin’! Hehehe!”  
  
Roadhog said nothing, turning away from his younger partner’s giggles.  
  
Mei’s brows knitted slightly, squirming a bit to loosen the junker’s grasp around her and turn the conversation back on track. “Um! S-so! So! We just wanted you to know…Mr. Roadhog, maybe we should come back later when you’re not still waking up?”  
  
“…Yeah,” he said.  
  
Junkrat scowled slightly. “Oi! But we was gonna ask him-”  
  
There was a pressure on his chest rather suddenly, and Mei was physically pushing him away from Hog, who was still leaning on the doorframe. He was going to demand an explanation, but she was shaking her head and giving him a rather strange look. One of those ‘Don’t question it, just do it’ looks, so he didn’t question it and just did it. Stumbling slightly into walking alongside her, he draped one arm back about her shoulders as she turned to glance back one last time at the other man.  
  
“We can come back later, okay? Just give him a few moments, it’s a lot to take in, remember? Besides, how about we go tell some of the others now?”  
  
There was the sound of a slamming door behind them as Roadhog vanished back into his room. Junkrat, baffled, looked up at the noise and then back to Mei. “Huh? Why would…Er. Yeah! Yeah, arright! Wanted to see Hana’s face when I tell ‘er anyway, bet she spits her soda out clear across the room.”

* * *

  
  
“ _I’M PREGNANT, LADIES N’ GENTS!_ ” Junkrat slammed the door open, sliding in as his peg leg screeched his momentum to a halt.  
  
Hana spat her soda out clear across the room, arcing several feet away in a wide spray that drenched Lucio sitting next to her.  
  
“Ah, man!” Lucio shrieked, looking down at his ruined shirt in dismay before he quickly began fussing over and patting Hana’s back while she coughed and choked for air. Still whomping her on the back, he looked up and gave the beaming junker a rather shocked look. “I mean, uh, hey, congrats? Hana says congrats too! Give us a sec!”  
  
“Oh god it burns!” Hana sputtered, wiping at her watering eyes and snotty nose where the sting of soda in her sinuses was still leaking out. Squinting through her tears, she looked up at him with a baleful suspicion. “Are you messing with us?”  
  
Junkrat grinned even more maniacally than usual, his teeth almost breaking apart from the rest of him. “Ain’t it great news!”  
  
“You literally just barged into my room and yelled that you’re pregnant, give me a second here!”  
  
Junkrat paused, thinking for a long moment. “Wait, is that what I said? No! No, I mean _we_! I mean, _her_! Me n’ Mei!”  
  
“No, I assumed that part!” She coughed a little more, patting her chest as Lucio soothingly rubbed her back. “Are you messing, though? Uh, no offense, Jamison, but didn’t you say you couldn’t? During one of your TMI sessions where you and Lucio started describing yourselves _in detail_?”  
  
Lucio smiled sheepishly, holding up both hands in plaintive defense. “Hey hey, I didn’t know you were in earshot! It’s a guy thing. I just forgot J-Man doesn’t have a ‘low volume’ setting.”  
  
Junkrat kept talking, indeed seeming to be stuck in his ‘high volume’ setting at all times. “No no no, it’s for real! She went in for a checkup, and Doc Angelface says there’s a little prawn floating around inside her! Never woulda guessed it, meself,” he said, hooking his teeth over his lower lip and looking smug. “Guess it’s all on account of me and my _incredibly_ viable sperm!”  
  
“Okay, first off, _ew_ ,” Hana wrinkled her nose. “Second, you said Dr. Ziegler confirmed it herself? Oh wow, that is…That’s actually big news then. Mei’s pregnant, really?”  
  
“Strewth!” Rat crowed. “And not to worry! It’s gonna be good, gonna have all their bits and parts, gonna be whole in the brain, and nothing on backwards! You’ll see!”  
  
Lucio and Hana glanced at each other with raised brows, then squinted back at him. The DJ shrugged, but offered a quick thumbs up to him. “Yeah, a healthy baby is a good thing, of course. How is Mei? When’s she due?”  
  
“She’s all apples, mate. Was real nervous tellin’ me this morning, real worried, kinda cute. I mean…Guess we were both surprised. Ya go through your whole life thinkin’ you got bodgy balls, and next thing ya know, you’ve knocked up your _also_ sterile girlfriend on a less than one percent chance, and it’s just prawns all the way down…” He trailed off a minute, thinking once more. “Think she’s happy, though. Nah, know she’s happy. She never said it out loud, but I know she wanted some mites of her own. I saw how sad she was when Angelface told her it was a no go for both of us. And now all of a sudden, this morning we found out it’s a go. She’s four weeks in.”  
  
Hana brightened, leaping off her sofa and heading to her mini-fridge, pulling out several bottles of Korean beer and tossing one to each of the boys. “축하해! Congratulations! Soooo…? Did you totally freak out when she told you?”  
  
“Hana!” Lucio grumbled, eyes darting to Junkrat as he popped open his beer. “Come on, girl!”  
  
“What? It’s a normal question! Who doesn’t freak out at something like that?”  
  
Junkrat tilted back his beer with a snicker. “Nah she’s right, I went a little loopy at first. I didn’t blow anything up, mind you! I was a real polite gent about it all, if you must know. We talked it over like two civilized folk do, decided to give it a go. Got us a real doc here for if it goes wrong.”  
  
“Wrong?” Lucio echoed, taking a sip of his own beer. “Did Dr. Ziegler say something was wrong?”  
  
“Nah! Nah, like, ya know, if it starts getting withered or a bit of the ol’ twisted limbs,” Rat answered with casual confidence. “But it won’t! And if it does…uh…we can handle it! But it won’t!”  
  
“Why would it-”  
  
A lightbulb seemed to go off above Hana’s head, taking a hold of Lucio’s arm abruptly as if to stifle him. “Ooooh. He means a radiation thing.”  
  
Lucio nodded slowly. “Thaaaaat makes sense. Come on, J-Man, you’re not in the desert anymore. You don’t have to worry about that kind of thing much, out here.”  
  
“I know, I know! Just…that’s how it was, is all. I saw a couple of ‘em, wasn’t real pretty, I’ll tell you. I er…sort of freaked out about that part. But Mei says the same thing, it won’t be like that. And Mei’s the smartest n’ most beautiful person in the world, so she knows a thing or two.”  
  
Hana snickered, draping herself across her own boyfriend’s lap in a rather obnoxious way. “It’s so cute and so gross how smitten you still get over her. Lucio, can you promise that you’re going to still be cute and gross about me, no matter what?”  
  
He grinned and leaned down to touch noses with her in a rather tender way, muttering a little, “Especially the gross part,” before puffing his cheeks and lunging to press his lips to her forehead, blowing a loud raspberry. PFFFFBBTBTBTT.  
  
Hana shrieked a laugh and kicked, spilling beer across her stomach as she pushed him away. “Oh my god, why do I hang out with either of you? Er…hey, Jamie, you okay?”  
  
While the other two had been wrestling each other, Junkrat’s eyes had gone far off, staring into the void with a rather thoughtful expression. Lucio paused, a flicker of concern on his face as he pushed Hana up from his lap. “Hey…Hey, J-Man, listen, it’s going to be all right. We’re gonna be behind you every step of the way, and we got one of the best doctors in the world on call, and you know the whole base would totally revolt if anything bad happened to Mei. You don’t have to worry about things like-”  
  
Junkrat shook his head, turning to his friends with a look of absolute wonder. “I was just thinkin’, mates…She’s gonna get all large with the baby, ya know…?” He looked positively dreamy, bushy brows raised and a tendril of drool and beer leaking out the side of his smiling mouth. “D’ya think her tits are gonna get even _bigger_?”

* * *

  
There was a knock at Roadhog’s door again, and he could tell it wasn’t Junkrat. Rat liked to knock with his metal fist and pounded on the metal or wood to make as much noise or possible. And the boy was tall enough that he had to duck into a lot of doors anyway, and his fist always hit near the top. This sounded like it came from the middle of the door, and was a much quieter and more polite rapping of the knuckles. That would be Mei, then.  
  
He opened it, and looked down to find the little climatologist peering up at him through her glasses, though its lenses were not as blank or as fogged as the ones on his mask. She cleared her throat softly, folding her arms behind her in an unsure way. “Mr. Roadhog, do you have a minute?”  
  
“…Yeah,” he answered, followed by a low sigh. “A minute.”  
  
“I told Jamie that I was going to Zarya’s…and I am! But I wanted to talk to you first.”  
  
She motioned him to follow her, sitting out on the gigantic, half-sagging couch with the dent in it where he alway sank down. Which was what he did now, the springs and wood creaking noisily as it took his weight. Probably not for much longer, before he’d have to order a new one. Mei sat alongside him, dwarfed even more than usual by his looming presence. She still didn’t seem sure what to say at first, before finally clearing her throat.  
  
“So…I don’t want to intrude on your business, Mr. Roadhog. I really don’t. But I’ve always noticed how you sometimes get when children are mentioned. I don’t think it’s obvious to anyone else, but I just started noticing it one day. You kind of look away and get more quiet than usual and it’s just…I guess I can’t really describe it.”  
  
Roadhog did not answer, so she continued.  
  
“I’m not going to ask about it. I can’t lie, I’ve wondered about it and I guess maybe I have suspicions, but it’s not my place to ask. But you know Jamison, he doesn’t notice things like that most of the time. That’s just how he is,” she said, offering him a little smile. “But I want you to know that even though he’s excited and he’s going to ask you about being a godparent or an uncle or involving you at all…You don’t have to say yes. I mean, I know you know that you don’t, but…” She fidgeted a bit. “You don’t need to feel pressured about anything to do with the baby. I’m going to be fine…I think.”  
  
He looked down to her slowly. “…You think?”  
  
“I’m nervous. I’m happy. I’m really, really scared,” she said, swallowing hard. “It’s everything I wanted and I was told it was never going to happen. I put that dream away a long time ago, and now all of a sudden it’s happening. But it’s not happening how I thought. And you two are just…You seem worried it’s going to be wrong. What if it’s wrong?”  
  
Hog tilted his head down at her.  
  
She rubbed at the side of her face, fumbling with her bangs. “What if it really is just an accident? And neither of us were supposed to? I mean, I’m so happy. But I’m scared too, Mr. Roadhog. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m putting this on you. I just wanted you to know, no matter what Jamison says, you don’t have to-”  
  
“Mei,” he said, and caused her to startle a little. He very rarely addressed her directly, with her name. “I know.”  
  
She gave a leery little smile. “Okay. Good. Um…Good. I just wanted to be sure-”  
  
“I was scared,” he said. “Everyone is at first.”  
  
“Hm?”  
  
He leaned both elbows on his knees, slumped forward. “First time I saw her, was more terrifying than the apocalypse itself. Held her, and all the fear went away. Can’t describe it. Not much good at describing things.”  
  
Mei just looked at him, surprise evident, but she opted to let him speak. But, as usual, it seemed he did not have all that much to say.  
  
“Couldn’t hold her anymore, after one bad day. But I remember. Can’t help but remember.”  
  
She lifted a hand to almost place it on his arm…but pulled back at the last moment. It didn’t seem right, this time. It didn’t seem to be what he wanted; her pity or her comfort or anything she could offer. Biting her lip a bit, she folded her hands back in her lap, looking ahead. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…Listen, I will talk to Jamison. I mean, I won’t tell him about…I mean, I’ll just tell him that you don’t want to be bothered-”  
  
“Didn’t say that.”  
  
She looked up at him again. “Mm?”  
  
“Ana and the little man know more than me about child-raisin’…I was no good for it. Not in the end. But I know you’re scared. Rat is too. But whatever scares ya…” He lifted his masked head, filters grinding. “…I’m scarier.”  
  
She offered him a little half-smile. “You are pretty scary, Mr. Roadhog.”  
  
“Not sure I can offer more than that. Least, not with the mite. Not sure I’m ready to be an uncle. Not yet. But I can take Rat off your hands when he irritates you. And he _will_ irritate you.”  
  
Her half-smile turned into a full one. “Oh, I know. I’ve read about getting mood swings, but even on my worst day I probably won’t have as many swings as he does on a regular day.”  
  
“Heh. You say that. I saw mood swings that would make even Rat run for cover.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Let me know if your cravings are Chinese food. I’ll get us Chinese food,” the huge man offered, for himself almost as much as her.  
  
“Is it true that the cravings can get really strange? Like pickles with ice cream sandwiches or some such?”  
  
“Either or. The offers stand.”  
  
She smiled up at him, cheeks dimpling happily. “That’s…that’s really nice of you, Mr. Roadhog. Thank you.”  
  
He grunted.  
  
Mei stood, heading for the door. “I’ll let you get back to it. But if you do ever think you can…Maybe one day, I think you’d make a really wonderful Uncle Roadhog.”  
  
She slipped out with a final little wave, leaving Roadhog alone in his room. That was fine. The quiet would give him more time to think.

* * *

  
  
The word spread within hours, although Mei was able to reach Zarya in time before she heard. She wanted to deliver the news in person. It had gone about as well as she could have hoped, in that Zarya was clearly conflicted with the whole idea; joyous for her friend while bemoaning its other parent. But after the initial shock had worn off, she congratulated her all the same.  
  
Hana and Lucio passed by on their way to the cafeteria, both of them offering hugs and kind words, saying how excited Junkrat seemed and how happy they were for them both.  
  
It did not take long for Ana to find her, cornering her by the main meeting area and asking for confirmation with a strange gleam in her single eye, which Pharah said was probably a cybernetic implant reflection that was already scrolling up wishlists and knitting patterns for baby things. She was only half joking, when the old woman swept Mei into a tight embrace and congratulated her, telling her to come seek her out if she needed any advice or help. Mei said she probably would be by very soon with lots of questions.  
  
Leaving the rumors to trickle where they may, she headed back towards Dr. Ziegler’s clinic. Junkrat was already waiting for her, leaping up from his waiting room chair and moving to pull her up against him, even clingier than normal.  
  
“There y’are, darl! I’ve been waitin’ here for hours, I think! Can’t be late to our first visit to the doc’s, right? Gotta make sure the miracle prawn is all ship-shape in you!”  
  
She groaned. “What did I say about the miracle prawn thing!”  
  
“That you loved it and it’s an ace name for an ace prawn?” he said slyly, lowering one long arm to rub his flesh hand atop her stomach pointedly. “Not to worry, you got months to get used to the idear.”  
  
“I’m never calling it the miracle prawn,” she vowed, looping both arms around one of his. “Are you ready to go in and read a bunch of cheesy pamphlets about being a new father?”  
  
“Too right! I’m gonna read every single one of ‘em cover to cover! Gonna order a whole bunch of ‘em and put them in my bombs so when they explode there’s lots of little pieces of paper with it, and the last thing they see is that I’m gonna be a da! ‘Spect they won’t have time to congratulate me in the heat of the moment, but y’know, it’s the details that matter.”  
  
Mei shook her head. “The way your mind works sometimes, I swear…”  
  
He grinned down at her, resting his pointed chin in her hair once more. “Naaaah, ya love it. Hope the kid inherits at least half of my unique brand of genius. Gonna get them their own scrapheap, teach them how to take things apart n’ put things back together!”  
  
“Slow down,” she chided softly. “It’s still just a cluster of cells at the moment, I don’t think it’s ready for engineering anything yet.”  
  
“Smartest cluster of cells in the world, then! Gonna teach it everything I know, and you can send it off to one of those fancy schools n’ everything. Bet it’ll be housebroken before ya know it, too!”  
  
“You don’t _housebreak_ a baby! You teach them to use th-”  
  
Dr. Ziegler swept open the door, looking to them both with a much more genuine smile than usual. “Sorry I’m a little late. Mei, Jamison, come right in. We’ve got a lot to cover, with Mei’s new medical schedule, how this will affect both of your times in the organization, and some recommended reading and classes for new parents.”  
  
She stood aside to let them pass, and Mei pulled forward, but was stopped by Junkrat’s arms still around her. She looked up, and saw a droplet of sweat roll down his temple as he stared into the cold whiteness of Mercy’s clinic. “Uh…Hey, doc, is it normal to be real happy but also be about ready to chunder absolutely everywhere?”  
  
“Don’t! Not on me!” Mei pulled away from him.  
  
The doctor smiled at them both. “More than normal, Mr. Fawkes. Actually, rather encouraging. It’s completely natural to be a tangle of emotions with something like this. For both parents. Just step inside and I’ll tell you everything about where we’re going to go from here.”  
  
“Heh…parents…Yeah, yeah, arright. Let’s go.”


	3. Chapter 3

Mei looked a bit like Roadhog. Or maybe Roadhog looked a bit like Mei. And it bothered Junkrat far, far more than it should have, it did. Mei had always been delightfully plush, but with her stomach swollen like that, she looked a bit like a watermelon on feet. Luckily, Junkrat loved watermelon. And it was his kid floating around somewhere in there, so all the better. But with such a big round belly, he sometimes expected to see a pig tattoo on it. And a few times he thought he’d seen a pig mask and pierced nipples on her too. Honestly, they looked pretty good on her, for the split second he’d imagined them. But he knew better than to tell her that.

And then Hog had gotten mighty uncomfortable that other night when Junkrat had been in one of his insomnia-induced manias, and he’d draped himself on Hog’s belly and started patting it and talking to the baby…It hadn’t been his fault. He could understand why Hog had growled and then pitched him across the room for it, but still. Not his fault. Sometimes his wires got a little crossed, that was all.

Not his fault that the best two people in his life were suddenly both big round things.

The very idea of a baby inside a belly was still absurd to him. Mei called it a ‘baby bump’, but it had gone so far past a ‘bump’ stage that he couldn’t help but scoff. And the fact that there was a miniature human inside that stomach? Unfuckingbelievable. It had swollen and pushed outward and now hung out past her toes, so she had to waddle instead of walk. And it must have been heavy. Like carrying a RIP-Tire, only inside of her. Poor darl, no wonder she got tired so easily.

And fuck him, but she was crankier than ever. He’d always found her sort of adorably snitty when she was cranky, but her mood swings had been giving his mood swings a run for the goddamn money. As she had progressed, they’d gotten more frequent, too. One moment she’d be yelling at him in Mandarin that he couldn’t even understand, then burst into tears, and then come crawling and sniffling to him for comfort, and then be laughing and happy again— all in under a minute. It was hard to keep up with that sort of thing, but he’d tried.

After all, she’d always been there for the times he was crazy. Only fair that he was there for her being crazy too. Especially since her craziness was sort of half his fault. The miracle prawn he’d put inside her was half him, and she’d not let him forget it. Especially on days when the baby was kicking her in the bladder or making it hard to sleep or just sitting too big and too heavy, and she’d lamented choosing a ‘giant Australian monster’ to put a pup in her.

But other days she would smile and run her hands over the bulge of her belly and sort of hum tunelessly with a far away look in her eye, and he’d never seen her so happy. She and Ana spent hours browsing catalogs for nursery things, while Angela fussed over her every chance she got. Even Zarya had eventually embraced the idea, although Mei had only been able to humor her through two sessions of that ‘pregnancy friendly yoga’ workout video. And Torbjorn was already planning playdates with his numerous grandchildren. As her belly had grown over the months, so had their excitement. All of them.

Yesterday he and Mei and Hog had been returning from lunch when she had stopped and taken a sudden breath, then reached out and taken his hand and put it on her stomach. There had been a fluttering pressure that had made his heart leap into his fucking throat like it always did, and he had proclaimed loudly that the baby was high-fiving him again. Mei had laughed and said it was more likely that it was trying to football-kick its father like it had been kicking its mother all day, but then she’d taken another sharp breath and had needed to sit down again.

So Roadhog had ripped a nearby bench up out of the ground and carried to her, while she went all pink and flustered and told them that that really wasn’t necessary. But she’d sat down on it anyway, her breath a little too quick and too deep while the little shite inside her must have been putting up quite the ruckus. Clutching onto Junkrat’s shoulder, her fingers clenched until they actually started hurting him, while she stared rather strangely at the ground in concentration. Eventually she blew out with pursed lips as she held her belly and rose again, gently excusing herself and waddling off towards her bedroom for another nap.

There was something wrong with the way she was walking. Something was off with her breathing, more than usual. And the way she had grabbed onto him? Junkrat watched her go with a very strange feeling. He’d never been the most observant of blokes, but something was different this time. He worried his lower lip until blood came, and his distress was quickly picked up by his ever-aware standover man.

“Soon,” Hog had said.

That was just what Junkrat was afraid of.

* * *

“Hog. Hey, Hog!”

“No.”

“Didn’t even give it a chance, mate! I was thinkin’ we—”

“No.”

Junkrat grumbled from where he was sprawled out on his back on the ground, staring listlessly up at the sky. “Can’t stay here, Hog. My blood’s itchin’. They got a transport what’s not too heavily guarded. Why don’t we take a hop and a skip and just pop a trip over somewhere. Have a row, blow up a building or two, grab a few things in our pockets, and then sneak back. Quick trip, won’t even know we’re gone!”

Hog didn’t look up from his huge cobbled-together lawn chair, hands folded over his belly and napping in the sun. “No.”

“How about a coffee! I’ll go get us coffee!”

“No.”

“You’re right, mate. Coffee makes me anxious. Boba, though! Nothing wrong with a nice boba tea. Mei says she can’t have any, but you and me! I’ll just—”

“No. Stop trying to leave.”

Junkrat kicked both feet out, rattling them on the pavement before he sat up. The concrete had indented his tough skin with ripples and dents, pebbles clinging to his back as he stretched his long body upright. “It’s not leaving! It’s just a…supply run! I’m going to get some supplies! That’s all. I’ll see you in a tick, and then w—”

Hog turned his head very slightly, and Junkrat quailed.

“Arright, arright!” Rat groaned, holding up both hands defensively. “You don’t gotta be like all that. S’just…I mean, isn’t it all a bit much? It’s a bit thick. Just sitting here with nothing to do but wait. Sitting and waiting for a baby. A baby, Hog! The hell am I supposed to do with a baby, anyway? It’s going to be out here soon. With me. I mean, us.” He sat down again, putting his face in his hands. “Can’t it just stay in there for a while longer until I’m ready for this shit?”

“Hmmm.”

“No need for that tone. Of course I’m still excited. Of course I know Mei’s still all for It. I am too! But I mean…All this time, it was just a prawn in her belly. I never thought it would actually come out!”

“Hmmm.”

“No, not literally, you heaving arse! I knew it was gonna come out eventually. But I mean…Doc Angelface says it could be any day now. Past due. Complications, right there! Kid wants to stay in its mum. Can’t blame it, really. It’s pretty great in there. Speaking as someone’s who’s personally been inside Mei many a time—!”

“Hmmm.”

“Right, right, too much info. Just…fuck! Hog! Maybe if the baby was a bomb, I got more experience with those. But it ain’t. Or at least, ain’t the right type of bomb. Damnit, do we still all have those pamphlets about bein’ a da?” He began patting down his shorts, sticking his hands in his pockets to search for them. “What did it say about this shit, with the kid being off-schedule? I dunno what to do!”

The massive pig-masked man shrugged one massive shoulder. “Just wait. It’s soon.”

“How am I supposed to make a bloody countdown when my own kid ain’t cooperatin’? Me and it are gonna have a talk when it pops out here, I’m telling you now. Bloody rude, makin’ everyone wait.” Rat did not find any helpful pamphlets stowing away in his shorts, sighing and giving up on the search. After a moment, he turned his wild yellow gaze on his guard, brows furrowed. “…What if it’s goin’ wrong already? Inside her? What if it’s—”

“It’s not. Doc would know.”

“Well, she also said she didn’t expect Mei and I to ever conceive, and look what happened? Knocked her right up with all my incredibly healthy and viable sperm, I did.”

“Ugh.”

“I’m just saying! Some doctor! Gettin’ things wrong! What if it’s all wrong? I-it could be all cold and twisted up in there. It hates being cold, Hog! What if it’s gotten all messed up on the insides? What if me and Mei were never supposed to—”

“It’s fine.”

Rat shrilled a high, nervous laugh. “Yeah, you’re right! Been over this, haven’t we? Me and her, we made a miracle prawn. Beat the odds. Laughed in the fuckin’ face of that 1% chance. Can handle anything you throw at us. S’fine, s’fine, s’fine…”

He searched for a fingernail to gnaw on, but had long ago bitten them all down to ragged stumps. He was still practically vibrating with nerves, tapping his single foot on the concrete while Hog continued his sunbathing and did not answer. They’d already been over it a thousand times. Rat had been violently tilting from happiness to anxiety and back again, after the deadline for delivery had come and gone. No matter how the doctor had assured him that this was entirely normal, he couldn’t help but fret. Nothing about this baby was normal. Nothing about any of this was normal.

After a few more minutes of his muttering and twitching, he finally leapt up and began loping off back towards the base proper. “Fine. Gonna go check up on her, then. Just one more time.”

Hog watched him go.

Limping back through base, he found Mei’s room empty, with a message that she could be found in the gym. Frowning and heading off towards it, he hoped that that didn’t mean the Russian was there with her. Last thing he needed to deal with was Zarya’s pinky-haired snideness, or he’d do something that both of them would regret. His nerves weren’t always the greatest even at the best of times, and lately they’d been absolutely shot.

Luckily, the gym was empty except for the treadmill in the very back. It had been turned onto the very slowest setting, and Mei was inching forward at a very leisurely pace. She looked as tired as he did, wearing a loose frumpled maternity dress and her hair starting to come out of its bun. But she brightened when she saw him, still waddling forward with that slightly painful-looking leaning-back walk that was the exact opposite of his forward hunch.

“Jamison!”

His gaze softened and he calmed slightly at just the sight of her. She was still in one piece and looking fine, other than being a big round thing ready to pop. So he moved up to face her, leaning on the equipment with both arms. “How ya goin’, darl? What are you doing in here?”

She grumbled and rolled her eyes, pulling on her glasses from where they’d been resting on the stand. “Everyone keeps telling me to nap or lay down or rest or take it easy. And I can’t go anywhere without someone fretting over me and trying to take me back to the clinic or my room. I can only rest so much! I just needed to move…so I’m taking a little walk, is all. Oh, please don’t tell Zarya I’m using the equipment in a dress. I will never hear the end of her safety lectures.”

“Won’t tell a soul, swear it. You uh, you got any updates from the doc?”

“Angela says everything is fine, it’s just taking a little longer. Nothing to worry about, yet. She said if it keeps up like this they can induce it, but she’d really prefer it to be natural. And so would I, really. There’s still time. Everything is fine, Jamie, I promise. Well there…there might be a small issue with tearing, but Angela is already working on it and she said it’s not a big deal, and I just need to keep trying to convince it to come out already.”

“You want me to yell at your stomach a bit? Give it a proper scolding? Wait…Tearing? What’s tearing?”

“I-I’d really rather not go into that,” she said quickly. “At all. And Angela said that they’ll be prepared. Believe me, I’ve been in that awful clinic for ages. It seems like even longer than when I was…frozen…” Her smile warped into a strange and sad little blank smile before she shook it away, huffing a few quick breaths as she continued her pace on the treadmill. “I’ve asked her all kinds of questions. But I asked her to keep it a little secret still, so I don’t know the sex of—”

“Hehe.”

“Jamie, really?” She lidded her eyes at him as he snickered at the word. “Anyway, I wanted it to be a surprise. I don’t know why. Do you think that’s silly?” She continued her little in-place walk. “But she’s been very good about it. She’s also bringing in some other doctor with a specialty in, er, large births in small women? Thank you for that, by the way. Giant monster Australians…”

He preened at himself a little, scrawny chest puffing out. “What can I say, darl? All these strong ‘Strayan genes were just too much for one bloke, had to share ‘em with someone! Ehehe. You know, since you got ol’ Junkrat around to keep Nan and the others at bay, why don’t you and me go out for a boba? Or I guess, I can get a boba and you can get one of those wheatgrass drinks what smell like feet, or like that smoothie but it’s sort of brown, with th—”

She interrupted him with a sharp “Oh!”

“Yeah! You know the one I mean, with the chunky bits—”

“J-Jamie!” She almost cried out, staggering and flailing one hand as she slammed it blindly onto the treadmill control several times.

He was about to question her when he saw it. Water was falling down from her dress, onto the treadmill as it ground to a halt, leaving a little wet smear along the middle as it did. For half a moment he foolishly thought it was sweat, before she looked at him with her expression of complete shock, her face going white. His eyes widened and he froze as well, staring back at her.

And in true Mei fashion, her first reaction was to mildly worry and apologize. “Sorry! I-I didn’t mean to make a mess. Th-the pad was…supposed to absorb…”

More fluid splattered onto the treadmill, and she moaned as she tucked both arms over her belly. A sour smell filled the little room.

Junkrat was silent for a moment longer before he remembered to breathe, and then he started screaming. “AAAAHH! AAHAHH! What do we do, what do we do?! Mei, the thing! Your thing! The thing broke!” He pulled at his hair, dancing on foot and peg helplessly as he spun in a circle. “Fuck! Fuck me! Uh! We were supposed to do something! Can’t remember!”

“Oh no! Zarya’s going to find out I was in a dress in the gym!” She scrambled off the machine, trying to walk in a very stupid manner while keeping her thighs pressed together. “W-we need to tell them—”

“Right! I’ll go get someone! I’ll go get someone, you just stay there! Oh fuck. Uh, gimme just a sec, I’ll go get someone!”

“Don’t leave me here!”

His top half paused even while his lower half was still trying to flee out the door, and he nearly fell over. “Right! Right! Uh…Oh, wait, comms! And robot lady! Hey, robot lady! You, Athena!”

There was a soft chime, and the soothing tones of the Overwatch’s overseer program spoke from above. “Do you need assistance, Dr. Zhou, Agent Junkrat? I will alert the medical staff at once.”

Rat hurried to help Mei as she started shuffling out the door, though she was so short that there was little he could do except try to keep her shoulder supported. She yelped and waved off his attempt to carry her, and was huffing and puffing in a very exaggerated way as she clutched onto him with another death grip that was making his skin dent inward under her fingertips.

He forgot everything the pamphlets had told him to do, and just petted over her head and called her a sweet thing and good ol’ girl. She gave him a terrified smile, sweat already beading on her gray face as she struggled to keep her breaths deep. Off in the distance, there was shouting. Ana was already headed their way at a pace he never would have guessed was possible from a 60+ year old lady, and Dr. Ziegler was close on her heels.

And then Mei was being ripped away from him, and he was babbling something about babies and schedules and bombs at them, he couldn’t even remember. All he knew was that Mei was suddenly gone from his side, being carted off towards the clinic, and he could vaguely remember the doctor telling him to get there whenever he could. And after that, everyone was suddenly gone and he was standing there alone like an idiot, slack-jawed and staring where they had left.

Finally, he managed to fumble with his communicator, pressing Roadhog’s icon again and again and again until the big lug finally answered.

“…Hmmm?” The baritone grumble sounded in his ear.

Rat practically screamed into the mouthpiece, expression strained and his gaze going mad and wall-eyed. “Hog, mate! She was in a dress on the treadmill! Don’t tell nobody!”

There was a pause as he tried to comprehend that one, before Hog just grunted. “On my way.”

* * *

He’d overheard people being tortured, before. Hell, he’d been tortured before and had the scars and the missing bits to prove it. Junkers so often ran afoul of other junkers. Not every crime was punishable by death, but a good maiming or suffering was pretty common. Something that always involved a lot of screaming. Prolonged punishment. Wave after wave of pain that left the throat raw.

And now Mei was being tortured in that other room, and she was the one screaming. Already he could hear her little voice going hoarse, ragged on the edges. Sometimes she sobbed, or whimpered, or exchanged breathless words with the doctors puttering around her. But then she’d start screaming again. Fuck, it must have been hurting her so bad. She was being tortured and there was nothing he could do.

Junkrat muttered and occasionally whined aloud as he paced outside the room, clutching at the places where he usually had his bombs, reaching for them over and over again. It was probably good that Hog had made him empty them out. Every time she screamed, fire shot through his nerves and urged him to go in there and stop it. He could blow up the doctors, or the bed, or all the devices they’d hooked up all over her. If he just destroyed enough things, eventually he’d destroy the thing causing her such pain. He’d save her from it, and she would wrap her arms around him and give him a kiss.

Well, scrap that last part. The thing causing her pain was a baby. His baby, in fact. The miracle prawn was biting and clawing at her insides, trying to rip its way out like a little monster. Torturing its own mother for hours now. Was he allowed to hate a baby? His baby? Probably not. Couldn’t help it though. The miracle prawn was now a monster prawn.

Inside the room, Mei screamed again and there was a beeping noise. Doors slammed open and shut and he could hear the doctors murmuring. If he listened, he could hear her the soft noises of her starting to cry again. He hated that sound. Would do anything to stop it…

As it was, he could only bury his tufted head back in his hands and mutter his dark thoughts. He searched amongst all the scattered coffee cups on the table, sticking his nose in them and finding every one to be empty. He couldn’t remember drinking all of them, but it might help explain why he felt so unbearably twitchy and agitated while he listened to his best girl being tortured one door over.

Roadhog sat patiently, taking up an entire waiting room bench meant for four people. He was, as usual, silent, but Junkrat could tell the old man was awake.

“Hog! How long’s it been!” he demanded, leaping up and moving back to the coffee pot. His hand was shaking as he set up the packets for more brew.

“…Nine hours.”

“Fuck me! Nine? How much longer until she’s done? Can we tell her that it's cut off at ten?”

“Hmmm.”

Two more cups of coffee went by and Junkrat listened to Mei’s voice, not sure if he should more worried when she was crying or when she was silent. Eventually she made a very strange sound, almost humorously deep for her, like a cow lowing. Or a moose, however he imagined a moose might sound like. It was a low moan that went up and down, and the door to the room slammed open a moment later.

Angela’s voice was muffled under her mask, nodding at him sharply. “Mr. Fawkes, my assistant is going to help sterilize you enough to get you in here…It may take some extra sanitizer, actually,” she said to whoever it was inside. “Full dilation and she’s starting to push. Do you wish to be present?”

His heart lurched down to hide somewhere in his intestines, swallowing hard. At a loss, he looked over to Roadhog, who just nodded at him. So he nodded too, blank-faced and stupid. One of the nurses set upon him with a sharp acidic-smelling cleaner, helping to pull a hairnet on what was left of his locks, a facemask, and gloves, even for his mechanical hand. And then he was being pushed, staggering into the delivery room itself, and—

Lamps were shining down on her like a spotlight, wearing a big wide paper shroud over her lifted legs. Dr. Angelface and two others were buzzing around somewhere down there, but he ignored them. Limping forward, he went to her side and found her small and gray and practically swimming in her own perspiration, hair sticking wet to her face as her eyes rolled up in delirious pain. For a moment she didn’t even seem to realize who he was.

“H-hey, darl,” he said nervously. “Y-you’re lookin’ great! Doin’ fine!”

“Mmmnn, rrnnhhh,” she answered, spittle on the side of her lip. “D-don’t…don’t lie to me.” She weakly lifted one hand and he took it, squeezing. It was cold and clammy in his grip. Huffing several more deep breaths, she winced and looked to the ceiling. “Aiyā，téng sǐ wǒ le! I can’t! I cant anymore, please. Jamie…”

“What can I do? What do I do?” he begged her, itching for some way to help, to distract himself from this absolute helplessness.

Her voice was very faint and not entirely self-aware. “Your breath smells like coffee. Can I have a mocha, please? W-with whipped cream.”

“Uh. Uh, yeah! I’ll get you one right after this. You want extra chocolate?”

She didn’t answer and just started screaming again.

There was a head, apparently. The docs were telling her to push, and she was. And he was pretty sure that she was going to snap all the bones in his flesh hand, she was squeezing it so tight, but it was softer than the metal one so that would be all right. But she was out of her mind with pain and the doctors, even Angelface, didn’t give a single toss about her. They just kept telling her to push, that it was ‘almost out’. Then push and push some more. Not even giving her any sort of break at all.

He pulled his hand out of Mei’s grip with a growl, marching over towards the doctors to give them a bloody piece of his mind. But the specialist, the one he didn’t recognize, mistook the reason for his coming over. Reaching up to grab onto the shoulder of his paper gown, she pulled him with surprising strength down to her level, down in visual range of the medical tarp covering up Mei’s bits…

“We’re almost there, Mr. Fawkes. See? There’s the top half, and there’s th—” Her words became very fuzzy and nonsensical, like rubber was being slowly shoved in his ears. His head swam and he suddenly felt very unsteady on his feet. All he could do was stare.

Junkrat had seen gore before. Explosions could be messy, after all, and the junker lifestyle in the Outback was more than a little perilous. He’d seen bodies in all kinds of states. Hell, he’d seen his own body mangled, his limbs off where they shouldn’t have been. He’d seen people ripped open, corpses with their innards scattered across the sand, and buzzards fighting over withered carcasses of animal and human alike.

But he’d never beheld anything even fucking close to what he saw under that paper blanket.

* * *

It was stereotypical for a man to faint in a delivery room. An age-old joke told in sitcoms and comedies across the ages. But he could remember his vision turning gray and narrowing down to a little pinhole, and then tilting to the side. And then damned if he wasn’t coming to outside in the lobby, sprawled out and overflowing across a waiting room chair, with Roadhog half-heartedly waving a magazine to fan him.

He groaned, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Ooohhh fuck. Did I—”

“Yeah.”

“Nurse brought me out?”

“Yeah. Wants you to eat something.”

“Yeah, nah. Coffee n’ sugar is fine, just need a bit more of it… Bloody hell, Hog. I’m never gonna eat again. There was…it was comin’ out of her…” He rubbed his face uneasily. “Lil’ hands and this weird…Is it s’posed to look that weird? In all that…blood and shit. Read that that happens sometimes, they shit durin’ it. And then all that red goop an’…Phwaw, never thought something so natural was so fuckin’ unnatural. Bet you can’t even imagine it, eh? Baby-having and whatnots.”

“…Hmmm.”

“S’pose I should head back in there, then?”

“Yeah. Heard it crying while you were out.”

“WHAT?!”

Stopping his coffee mid-pour, he downed it in two gulps and threw it aside before pulling his mask back on and charging back into the room… Only to be stopped short by the specialist lady yet again, who boldly placed a hand on his chest to hold him back. He narrowed his eyes down at her and looked past to Mei…only to find her very pale and very still. His brows shot upward, and he surged forward despite the smaller woman placing both hands on him and heaving back with all her might.

“Darl! Mei!”

“Mr. Fawkes, wait! Stop, stop!”

There was cursing and a scuffle, and Angelface emerged from between Mei’s raised legs, separating them. He glanced to her, then back to Mei, to her, back to Mei again, and took another step forward. Dr. Ziegler went to push him back, leaving smears across the thin paper he wore, and he noticed her gloves had blood all over them. Not unusual for her, but considering the source…

Ziegler stood strong against his advances, voice harsh and no-nonsense, not to be argued with. “Fawkes, don’t you dare disturb her. There were some complications with her delivery. There is some bleeding, but she’s sedated while she finishes healing. Her recovery time might be somewhat longer than I thought, but both Mei and your daughter should be fine—”

He stopped. The world fell away and everything stopped. Even the ringing in his ears and his once rapidly thudding heartbeat from all that coffee, and the ticking of the clock, and absolutely everything went silent. And in that silence, he managed to cough up one word, a weak and croaking, “…What?”

The doc was saying something but it didn’t matter, not compared to what she’d said before.

‘Your daughter’.

_Daughter._

The miracle prawn was a girl. He’d had a girl. He and Mei had a girl. It was real. _She_ was real.

He started swaying again, though at least this time he didn’t pass out. There was a chair off to the side of Mei’s bed, so he staggered the last few steps and practically fell down atop it, expression slack. His heart had started to beat again, a staccato coffee-driven thud that only quickened when he saw the nurse move to a little bin with a blanket in it, and pick up a very small bundle. She held it like a bomb, all fragile and careful-like, and she came towards him with it.

She held the bomb prawn out to offer it to him, and he started to reach… only to glance towards the metal hand he’d stuck onto the stump of his right arm. It was cold and hard and shouldn’t touch this sort of thing. Shaking his head furiously, he helplessly waved the prosthetic limb. “Uh…I can’t, I can’t…What if it hurts the—”

“Just put it under her rear there,” the nurse assured him. “And use your other hand under the head. Just like you were taught. There we go…”

Wrapped in a pastel green suit and a blanket, the tiniest little thing was put in his arms, and it was so light but also so heavy at the same time. It squirmed and made a noise, and tried to wave an arm that was trapped in bundles of fabric. Tiny, so tiny, a little scrunched red face turned to look blankly up at him. It gurgled again like a backed up toilet, and it looked a bit like a grumpy potato, only with wisps of pale blond chicken-feathers of hair stuck to its ugly head.

She was the most beautiful fuckin’ thing in the whole world.

“Nnnggah!” The baby scowled up at him with her eyes still closed, balling one tiny fist and swinging blindly to try and punch him in the chin. Feisty, feisty little junker prawn. She must have gotten that from her da.

Who would have thought that of all the things he’d cobbled together over his life; all the explosives and devices and guns and things he’d made, that this little thing would have been the best of them? This little shriveled creature in his arms, who smelled a bit like shit and blood and the soap they’d tried to cover it up with, but also a weird new-to-life freshness that he couldn’t entirely describe. He hunched over her covetously, curling in and drawing her up against his chest. Head down, he murmured to her and stroked a thumb over her cheek.

“How ya doin’, prawn?”

He touched her face, carefully running the calloused pads of his fingers along her scrunched features. Two eyes, though he didn’t know what color they were. Blond hair, though not much of it yet. A nose. A little pink mouth. Two ears. She had all her limbs, too, down to the last finger. She was whole. She was good. Maybe that was mostly due to her mother and not him… but it didn’t matter. She was a good one. She was perfect.

Giddiness mixed with all the caffeine and it bubbled up inside his ribcage, clutching his bundle close as he turned to the bed. “Mei, it’s our miracle prawn! Mei did ya see! Did ya see her? Did ya ever see anything like her in your whole life?”

Mei didn’t answer, and Angela cleared her throat gently. “I’m afraid she’s still under for a bit until she’s patched up. This was a very difficult labor for her. You’ll just have to be patient. But until then…so long as you’re careful, I think you should hold your new girl and start bonding. And before you even ask—”

Rat shut his mouth where he had just opened it.

She continued. “—You may show Roadhog through the window only. No introductions until after we medically clear her.” She nodded her head aside to the blinds obscuring the glass pane to the next room.

He was already moving, limping away and slamming a hand down on the button that snapped the blinds. They clacked apart and drew upward, and he could see the massive lump that was his bodyguard still sitting in the waiting area. He brightened, jaws in an open grin, and then began rapping at the glass. When he saw the pig mask turn towards him, he hefted his arm with the little green-wrapped bundle, lifting her up and pointing and mouthing the words ‘prawn, prawn’ at him.

Outside, Hog slowly hefted himself upright and was across the room in only two enormous strides. Leaning down from his absolutely massive height, he lowered his masked face until it was almost level with the baby herself. Rat had never been able to see much through the foggy lenses, but he could tell Hog was looking at her very, very carefully. And similarly carefully, he lifted one huge fist and outstretched one thick black-nailed finger, pressing it to the glass separating him from the little girl.

She stretched in Rat’s arms, wriggling weakly in her blanket and punching him in the chest again with a tiny flailing hand. Rat beamed down at her, then back at Hog with his face still lit up.

Hog only stared down at the baby girl for a long while before withdrawing, lifting back up until his head couldn’t even be seen, too tall above the window. Then he offered Junkrat a slow thumbs up…and turned and left. Hiking at his sagging trousers, he turned and simply walked down the hall, and didn’t return.

Rat waited, but nothing doing. Hog was gone. So eventually he returned to the chair next to Mei’s bed and fussed over the prawn while the doctors continued to fuss over Mei. Placing a finger into her tiny hand, she gripped it with brittle little digits and scowled and drooled all over herself like the magical little thing she was. Adjusting her blanket, Rat only held her against his ribs and tickled her through all the fabric keeping her little baby rage at bay.

“Ggghh,” she said.

“Yeah! Gave me a fuckin’ scare, you did. Whoops, shouldn’t say ‘fuckin’ anymore, I suppose,” he told her. “Was going to give you a proper scolding for being late, but how can I stay mad at that face, eh? You could get away with murder, even. Just like your da and your uncle. Don’t tell Mei I said that.”

He paused to give Mei a concerned look. She was still pale and sleeping, but her breathing was steady and the doctors didn’t seem worried. They’d even started to pack up, with all the tools they’d used for…all the things they’d done down there. Angela had shed her gloves and med gear, leaning to mutter something to her cohorts before looking at him.

“Everything should be well enough for now. Although I do want you to call for us when Mei wakes up. Which should, hopefully, be soon.” She glanced to her watch. “I’d prefer the first feeding to be natural…And I’ll need to check the latch and take care of the meconium…” She glanced to the little girl, going over the checklists in her head. “Not to mention all the… Well, that can come later. Do you have everything you need, Jamison? If you have any questions at all, rest assured that one of us is always available.”

He paused, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Hey, doc.”

“Mm?”

“Is she…?” He motioned down to his green-wrapped bundle. “Is she good? She’s got everything she needs? She’s not…ya know?”

“This is not Junkertown, Jamison,” she answered gently. “No radiation of note here. Your daughter is free of any noteworthy birth defects that we are aware of. And if there are any concerns, we have the best medical connections available to her…And Mei,” she added, noting his concerned glances to the sleeping woman nearby.

“I…Y-yeah. Yeah, good. S’good.” He nodded, relieved. “Oh, doc?”

“Mm?”

“How long can I cuss in front of the baby afore she knows that it’s bad?”

She sighed, but smiled a little. “I’m going to hold off on giving you any sort of timeframe for an infant’s cognition and language awareness, knowing that Mei is probably going to make her opinion on that very clear. Let me know if you need anything else, Jamison. I’ll leave you to your family.”

That was a strange word, right there. ‘Family’.

He kinda liked it.

* * *

The baby was crying.

Mei’s eyes flickered slightly, slowly coming up from under the thick blanket of drugged sleep. She still felt tired and sore, but the the primal sound of the infant’s squawling called to her and specifically her. Peeling her lashes apart, she stirred and reached out towards the sound.

Underneath the fussing and whimpering, she heard a much more familiar voice. “Aw, awww! C’mon, l’il love, none of that now. Where was I? Right, right, so there your da was, surrounded. Musta been ten…no, twenty of ‘em. Now luckily for you, I’d been wantin’ to test this new kind of bomb I’d been working on—”

“Jamie,” Mei managed to say aloud. “No violent stories until she’s older.”

“Mei! Darl! Just in time! The prawn’s getting fussy.” He leaned over the bed, still rocking the green-swaddled bundle in his arms and looking a bit frazzled. “How you feeling?”

“Tired,” she said. And he could tell she was tired indeed; exhausted, even. But that tiredness was rapidly fading, leaving her struggling to sit up against the mattress. “Is she…okay? Is she…”

“The prawn? She’s apples, love. Hungry, I think. Here, take her?” He leaned down and placed a wet kiss to her forehead, transferring the squirming swaddled thing into her arms.

Mei’s haggard expression softened, and even the aching pains in her lower half were forgotten. Stroking the little wisps of yellow hair, she adjusted the baby in one arm and undid the snap to the fold of her robe, pulling said ‘prawn’ to her chest. The baby wasted no time, latching hungry lips onto her breast and finally going still. Mei waited for the inevitable comment, and it was not long coming.

“See? That there’s my girl! Appreciates a fine pair!” he crowed proudly.

“I’m too tired to whap you for that,” she admitted, running her fingertips along the baby’s back with a distracted smile. “I can’t believe she’s…here. Here she is.”

“Not to worry, already gave her the what-for for being so late, makin’ everyone wait. We had a discussion, her and me. Told her she was forgiven, of course. Look at her, ain’t she the prettiest thing you ever seen?”

“She is.” She leaned down to press her lips to the top of the little head on her chest. “Tā zhēn kěài.”

“Hehe. She’s already doin’ that scrunchy-nose thing that you do when you’re unhappy. She’s gonna look a lot like you, I bet. Wonder if those yellow chicken-feathers are gonna fade. Shame. Although, maybe she’ll get her da’s winnin’ smile!” He leaned onto the bed with them, the coffee-and-baby-fueled adrenaline starting to fade. “S’posed to get the doc to check in on you now that you’re up, by the by.”

“I’ll call her right after she’s done eating. I just…I want to remember this moment right now, you know? I never thought I would get to have anything like this. For a while I thought I’d lost it all. And now I have her…and you. And my friends here. So I have everything. And it’s just—” She lifted the back of her hand to scrub at one leaking eye, sniffling. “Oh, sorry. Um, hormones.”

He offered her a tired grin. “Aw, sweetness.”

“I can’t wait for her to meet everyone.”

“Ah, yeah, that might be a bit. Even Hog only got a glimpse of her. Medical tests and everything to come. Angelface’ll be in here, wanting to poke and prod everything before ya know it. And if my prawn is anything like me, she won’t be too keen on being interrupted during mealtime. Lookit her, going to town. Who’s my hungry l’il girl!”

Her eyes swerved up to him. “Speaking of, Jamison. Have you eaten anything? I recognize a sugar crash when I see one.”

“Uh…Roadie’s fault. Wouldn’t let me get any supplies. Asides, no time for a meal, I gotta be right here. Just uh…You know, maybe a tiny power nap while the kiddie’s having a lunch? Just restin’ my eyes. You won’t mind?”

“Mmhm. Just a little one.”

She nodded, and he promptly folded his arms atop her mattress and buried his face in them. He relaxed as her hand drifted over to stroke at the wild tufts of blond hair on his head, much as they had for the blond hair on his daughter’s. He uttered one reedy, fading little giggle, before his shoulders slumped and he all but collapsed with long-held exhaustion. Mei let him rest while he could. They would both be needing all the rest they could get. And it gave her a few minutes alone with her new girl.

The baby finally withdrew her tiny mouth, seemingly full and satisfied. With a grunt, she fussed, trying to turn her feeble head this way and that, and her eyes opened. She tried out a smile at nothing in particular, milk leaking out of her mouth, and made a little noise when Mei reached to wipe it away. But much like her father, she relaxed quickly at Mei's touch, when she gathered her up and pulled her up atop her chest, resting nearly cheek to cheek. Her movements slowed as she nestled into the warmth of her mother, lulled by the heartbeat and the steady rise and fall beneath her. With a sigh, she fell asleep as well.

Mei was left in her bed, enjoying the calm after the storm as the others slept. She knew it wouldn’t last long. Chaos would soon follow, so it was best to enjoy moments just like this one— Where Jamison and the baby were both quiet and safe and in her arms right where they belonged, however brief. His breath wheezed softly just beside her, joined by the higher-pitched little sighing breaths of their little one. After all that time waiting, they were together.

With a private smile, Mei glanced aside to make sure he couldn’t hear. She’d always playfully fought him on the nickname, and couldn’t give him the satisfaction. So, assured that he was asleep, she leaned to place a kiss to the slumbering baby’s head.

“My little miracle prawn…”


	4. Chapter 4

“Wwweeeh…”

There was a sound in the night, a soft whimpering coo. It was barely audible to the human ear, little more than a whisper of a noise. But it made Mei’s eyes shoot open as her blood turned to ice. It was the last thing in the world she wanted to hear at that very second. It was the sound of the baby starting to wake up.

Again.

She moaned aloud, turning over and trying to convince herself that it was her imagination. The noise could have been anything, really; maybe a distant traffic noise from the road, or a fan turning on somewhere, or her boyfriend was working on something, or maybe the television was on and that was for some reason the only sound on the tv program. It could have been anything, so Mei pulled the covers up to her chin and clenched her eyes shut once more. Up until she heard it again.

“Wwwweeeehhh…!”

It sounded louder and more awake and a lot less happy, almost a warning as to the torrent that was to come. Mei sighed and galvanized herself into action before it could ramp up any more, pulling on her glasses and looking to the bleary-looking numbers illuminated from the clock. Not quite two in the morning, but it was as good a time as ever for a feeding wake-up call. She flicked on the light, pulling on her robe and slippers as she started to climb out of bed, to shuffle across the room to where the noise was emanating from its crib.

“Oi!”

A very different noise sounded from the doorway of the bedroom, and she realized the door was open and lit up, and a familiar silhouette of patchy hair and an overly large pointed nose was peeking in. Junkrat crept in a moment later, awake and cheerful as ever as he stood with his hands on his hips and looked her up and down. “There’s my chipper girl! Is the prawn fussin’ again? Here, I’ve got her. You go on back to bed, darl. You know, she already took a bottle once or twice, with the pumped stuff. You just give me a tick, got to go heat up the milk and whatnot. And yes, I’ll remember to test it afore I give it to her. Read all those pamphlets several times over and…Aw, Mei, you don’t need t—”

“Wǒ xǐng le…I’m awake, I’m already awake,” Mei mumbled in reply, far from the ‘chipper girl’ he described her as. She stood there with her robe half on and tied sloppily around her middle, her glasses crooked on half-open eyes, and her hair all piled to one side where it had come loose in its tie. She collapsed down into the chair next to crib, pulling open her pajama top. “Can you…Um, you give?”

Junkrat frowned, leaning down to reach both arms into the crib. It was a patchwork of colors and gifted soft things; everything from Ana’s hand-knitted baby blanket, a ducky-printed bassinet mattress from Torbjorn’s many grandchildren, and a spinning mobile that Ms. Vaswani had specifically programmed to emit soothing waves of colored light at certain times. His little girl was dressed in a D.Va Little-Star onesie, complete with her signature bunny-face and Hana’s autograph to ‘her smallest fan’.

His prawn had been cleaned, prepped, and then medically cleared several weeks ago, finally allowing for them all to go home. But they were still on ‘strong medical recommendations’ from Dr. Angelface to let Mei rest and recover for a bit, as well as to get acclimated to having a newborn around, before they invited their friends over for visitation. Junkrat had scoffed at first, but even he had to admit that his poor Mei had had a rough time of the delivery and needed to recup. And although he was trying to let her get the rest she needed, the miracle prawn was having other ideas.

He scooped her up as carefully as he always did, just as he had been taught. Support the arse, support the head, lift at the same time, don’t let her go wobbly. And even then, wobble-less though she was, she put up a prompt fuss as though she was the one who was being disturbed, even after waking everybody up.

“ _WWWWEEEHHHH!_ ”

“Hooly dooly, you got a set of lungs on you,” Junkrat mused with clear approval. “Lucky they moved us to where we got no neighbors. Swanky new pad for a swanky new prawn, eh? C’mere, you wanna hang with your da or— No? Right, right, we all know what you’re after. Heh! Single-minded focus! Gotta admire that drive!”

Mei jolted upright where she had started to drift off again, half asleep in the chair with one breast hanging out, head lifting sharply as Junkrat rounded on her with the baby. “Huh! No, I’m…I’m still here. I’m awake.”

“Yeah nah, not lookin’ too very awake, sweets. Why don’t you climb back under those snowflakey covers. I’ll feed her—”

“No! No, I read it’s better for her this way. I can do it.”

“Uh, you sure you got this, darl?”

“I can feed her,” Mei mumbled, accepting the bundle and transferring her to one arm as the baby latched into place and finally went quiet again. For a while she just sat there, eyes half closed, before grumbling softly, “I hope this is just a phase and she didn’t inherit your sleeping schedule. What were you doing up?”

“Had that nice nap this afternoon since we’re on prawn-time now. Couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d work on those new blueprints. You remember the blinged out boom trolley debacle, don’t you? Well I thought about that, and then I thought about those prams for the prawn. And you know what, a pram would be a perfect vehicle for a heist! Can’t believe I never thought of it before!”

“Mm-hmm, pram prawn,” Mei said, head drooping.

“Now of course the prawn herself won’t be involved. That’s being a good da, right there. No heisting until she’s older. But fuck knows, love, we got enough baby clothes to clothe ten prawns here. So I borrow some of her things for new design I’m working on. And voila, I call it the Bomb Baby! Patent pending, of course.”

“Mm-hmm…”

“You even know how much loot we can stuff into a pram? And nobody’s going to think to search one of those, especially during a heist. And if they do, that’s where the Bomb Baby comes in. Now I know you got a tender heart and whatnots, not at all suited for heisting. So it’ll probably just be me and Roadie again. Boys’ Night Out! Only, I guess it might be more believable if one of us is the mum to the Bomb Baby. Probably me, then. I look pretty good in a skirt if I do say so myself, plus that lovely breeze up around my bits. Plus I tried to put Roadie in a dress one time and oh boy, Mei, it did not go well for anybody involved. Say, you mind if I borrow your—”

When he turned back around, Mei’s head had dropped to one side and she was soundly asleep even though the baby had finished her meal and was squirming helplessly against Mei’s chest, staring up at her mother’s face with a baffled sort of semi-expression. Junkrat cut himself off mid-jabber, scratching at his head and sucking audibly on one tooth before he limped forward once more. He scooped the prawn from Mei’s grasp, tucked her tit back into her pajamas for her, and haphazardly slung a blanket over her slumped form. His poor girl was still exhausted and he needed to let her rest. The both of them, actually, needed to let her rest.

He paused only to grab a cloth and clean away the milk and drool from his daughter’s chin, carrying her off into the other room and shutting the door behind him. Setting her against his shoulder, he began patting lightly at her back. “All right, you. You can be my Bomb Baby until the plans are finalized. And sorry, little love, but it’s bottle for you for the rest of the night. Your mum’s had a fuckin’ time of it. Heh! Whoops, I mean, uh, not-fuckin’. No cursing for prawns, right?”

“Bbbllb!” The baby girl crossed her eyes, burped, and drooled all over him in reply.

“Couldn’t have put it better, myself.”

* * *

Mei awoke to the strange sensation of morning…not 4am or 5am, but a regular morning with the sun starting to rise. But though the gentle pink light streaming in the window should have been comforting, she couldn’t help but jolt awake as though icy waters had been thrown over her senses. She had been sleeping. Actually sleeping, undisturbed, for hours, with nobody to interrupt her or demand feeding every other hour. She was slumped in a chair, and the crib next to her was empty.

Panicked, she hauled herself upright and threw herself forward, staggering across the bedroom to fling open the door…Only to find Junkrat snoring softly on the couch in front of the television, surrounded by crumpled paper and bomb casing templates and an empty bottle. Their daughter was sleeping just as peacefully, wrapped in a soot-smeared blanket and nestled in the crook of his arm.

Nobody, least of all her, could have predicted how someone like him would have reacted to fatherhood. But he had taken to it as easily as he had everything else in his strange life. Beating all the odds stacked against them both, he had sired a child that was unmistakably his. Dr. Zeigler had already joked about how the radiation must have warped his genetic structure enough that his recessive-gene blond hair and wild eyes had been inherited by his baby, though it was entirely possibly her hair would darken to the same color as her mother’s as she grew older. But for now, there were two blond heads laying almost one on top of the other…and with Junkrat’s patchy locks, they both had almost the same amount of blond hair too.

She still hadn’t had time to unpack everything in their new shared living quarters in a different part of the dorms, and winced at every clink or rattle as she tried to sort through the mess and find her favorite coffee mugs. It wasn’t ideal to have the stress of moving all their belongings on top of dealing with a newborn, but Mei’s little dorm room wasn’t set up for such things, and Junkrat…Junkrat had lived in a garage full of trash, shrapnel, and live explosives. Winston, Ana, and the higher-ups had all but insisted that they take it, and so she had.

Soon the coffee pot was burbling softly, and a familiar voice from across the room called a low, “Oi, Mei, make an extra pot for your favorite rat? Lemme just— Ohhh that leg’s asleep. And so’s the rest. Cramping. Cramping!”

He stirred, pins and needles shooting up from what limbs he had left as Mei padded across the room and gently relieved him of his charge. The prawn made a noise and scrunched her face, but luckily remained slumbering while Mei deposited her back in her crib in the next room. Junkrat stretched life back into his tired limbs, stretching out fully on the couch as joints creaked, massaging at the stump of his arm with his good hand.

Mei returned shortly, sitting down on the edge of the sofa while he wrapped what was left of that arm around her waist. She smiled down at him sheepishly, resting a hand upon it. “You didn’t have to do it all by yourself all night, you know. Did you have trouble with the bottle? She doesn’t like them as much.”

“Pft. Now, I may not have precisely the same medical training as Doc Angelface, but I know when my girl needs restin’ up. Asides, I was awake anyhow, so my prawn and I had scintillating conversation over several late-night tuckers. I told her that now was no time to be picky. Blimey, she can put it away, can’t she? She eats enough to rival Roadie. Probably shits enough to rival him too. Phwaw! Glad it’s not me washing those nappies.”

“I guess I do feel better after sleeping,” she admitted, lowering down until she was on top of him and pinning him to the couch once more as she pulled a blanket over the both of them. “For once, your awful sleeping habits are sort of working out…But I still think you need to sleep at decent hours and drink less coffee!”

“Uh-huh. You remembered to put on another pot for me just now, yeah?”

“Yes.”

She tucked her head under his pointed chin, and surprisingly even Junkrat was quiet while they enjoyed a rare moment of early morning peace together. But as always, it wasn’t to last. He was soon squirming beneath her, and she recognized his movements as him trying to scoot out from under as sneakily as possible. When she felt a jab against her thigh, she realized why. Her eyes opened, glancing up towards him before she shifted one leg to grind against him on purpose.

He grunted and inhaled sharply, looking startled. “Uh! That’s not, uh…I mean, mornin’ wood, can’t help cracking a fat! And you’re kinda on top and all and…er, you know? And we c— Oh, you meant to do it, that time! S’cruel! Can’t do this when I’m already all keen to root!”

She grinned up at him cheekily, sliding down lower on the hard planes of his bony chest. “What? No, that was an accident!” She pressed down on him again, a little harder.

“Oi! Can’t do that to an innocent bloke! You were just up the duff! I mean, docs said we still got a while to go before we can—”

Mei only grasped the top of the blanket with curled fingertips, pulling it over her as she slid down all the way down his body towards the very end of the sofa. Junkrat lay frozen, cheeks and ears burning red as he looked down at the lump in the blanket below him, where he could hear the shuffle of fabric and the tug of his pajama pants. Mei’s voice came from somewhere down in the covers.

“We…still have a little time before we need to get ready? Before she wakes up and before the coffee’s done?”

He relaxed and practically melted into the sofa a moment later as the lump of her head under the blanket began gently moving up and down. “H-hooly dooly, that’s…yeah, that’s heaps good. I gotta start knocking you up more often.”

The coffee pot continued burbling, drowning out their sounds as their little girl continued sleeping in the next room.

* * *

Mei carefully finished adjusting the elastic of the little yellow bow around the prawn’s fragile head, shooting Junkrat a look when she noticed that someone had drawn a familiar toothy x-eyed cartoon face in the center. “Jamison!”

“Thought it could use a touch-up. Asides, she likes it! Look at that face!” He grinned down to where the baby looked startled at the sensation of anything on her head at all, trying to control her eyes enough to look up at it. “Attagirl, prawn! You’re gonna wow everyone’s arses right off today. You ready?”

“Eeengh!” she said.

“Too right!” he said, turning back to where Mei was still fussing. “Ten dollarydoos says Nan’s going to be here first thing.”

“I am not taking that bet at all,” Mei replied, smoothing out the ruffles in the overly-fancy little outfit that the baby would probably outgrow within the week at the rate she was eating. “Ms. Amari already said she’s going to be by as soon as she can today.”

“Uh, did she happen to mention if—”

“Yes, she said she’s bringing you sweet feteer.”

“Ace!”

They had just finished their breakfast and coffee, and Mei had just put the finishing touches on their girl’s ensemble when there was a buzz at the door. Mei and Junkrat shot each other a knowing glance, before Junkrat hobbled over to the door, hissing open to reveal where Ana and Fareeha were standing expectantly, just as Mei had said.

“Fawkes,” Ana said, shoving a wrapped platter into his hands before he could say anything, as the junker’s face lit up and he limped off eagerly to the kitchen. She barged inside, practically dragging Fareeha after her. Her single eye brightened at the sight of Mei holding the tiny ruffled bundle. “Ah, ya helo! There she is, look at the little beautiful!”

Mei smiled, gesturing for them both to sit before carefully approaching Ana. It was actually nice that she had been the first one to show up. There were few on base that Mei trusted more, or had more experience with children. Especially when her own adult child was looking a mix of annoyed and maybe a little terrified as Mei closed in with the baby. “Angela said everything is looking fine and she is ready to meet everyone. Sorry, she just ate so she might be a little sluggish? Would you like to hold her?”

Ana’s expression became a little watery as she accepted the fragile little package into both arms, smiling down and running a crooked finger down a chubby cheek. “Ah, so many memories of mornings just like this. They start off so small before they get so big. And just look at that hair. Congratulations, Fawkes.”

Junkrat, his cheeks bulging with feteer, offered a syrup and sugar-covered thumbs up from the kitchen. “Mmfgh.”

“So this is ‘the miracle prawn’. I take it you still haven’t decided on a name? Or at least, I hope you’ve not actually named her after a shrimp.”

“No no! That’s just her nickname. Jamie kept calling her that and it sort of stuck,” Mei grinned sheepishly. “Um, she’s registered with Ziegler’s clinic records but just under our names. We’re still trying to settle on the perfect name for her. I used to have a list of traditional Chinese names I liked, but—”

“But my miracle prawn is half ‘Strayan!” Junkrat interrupted from by the counters, spraying it with crumbs. “More than half, actually. Just look at her, that’s my girl. And they said my sperm would never amount to anything!”

“Jamison!” Mei hissed, eyes narrowing even while Ana smirked in the background.

“The prawn is the strongest girl around. So how about a strong Ozzy name, I’m thinking? Up until she earns her first real junker name.”

“But why does she even need a junker name?”

“They just sort of develop, love. But rest assured, they get to be even more important than the old ‘formalities’ name in the end. Like Junkrat, Scrubgrub, Razor-Eater, or Motorgoat. Knew a lovely lady who working in smelting, everyone called her The Slag-Slag. Or this one bloke with no legs who…Well, we got ladies present, um. Or what if she gets the name Commander Crunchface! Oh-ho, people will think better of messing with her then!”

“Jamie, I am drawing the line at anybody naming our daughter Commander Crunchface.”

“What’s wrong with—”

“I think maybe you should reconvene on the naming thing later,” Ana said, interrupting them smoothly. “How are you feeling, Mei?”

“It was…It was kind of hard, although I feel a lot better after resting. But it was worth it. I never thought I’d be able to, after everything that happened. But then here she is, and…and she’s just so wonderful?” Mei said, smiling at where the little girl was starting to drift off again in Ana’s grasp. “I know she can’t even really see very well yet, but the way she looks up at me?”

Junkrat loped over, wrapping a sticky-sweet hand around Mei’s waist. “Heh. I like it when you put your finger in her l’il hand and she gives it a squeeze. And ya got to humor them at that age and whatnot, so I go ‘Yow-ow-ow, ya got me!’ and tap out. Think she likes it.

“I know what you mean,” Ana said. “I have so many photos of Sam and I, from just after Fareeha was born. I will show you sometime.”

“Mom,” Fareeha protested mildly, looking away. “Nobody likes being bored with my baby pictures.”

“Who knows, habibti. It might be you holding a little girl just like this one day. Civilian life has its own perks, you know.”

“So did growing up on a military base, as I recall?”

There was a strange little edge to the woman’s tone, as mother and daughter looked at one another over the slumbering baby cradled between them. Junkrat, oblivious as ever, had started tucking on yet another chunk of feteer. Mei quickly cleared her throat, leaning over and retrieving her little girl and transferring her to one arm. “Um, Ms. Amari!”

“Hm?”

She glanced about before leaning in, lowering her voice and whispering in the old woman’s ear. Ana lifted both brows, then merely laughed aloud, waving one hand limply.

“Oh no, that’s completely normal. Their little bellies are still getting used to things, so it turns into all sorts of colors and textures. Believe me, I was concerned at first too. Some of Fareeha’s first bowel movements were—”

“MOM!”

They stayed for a while, drinking tea and talking about childrearing, until both Junkrat and Fareeha’s restlessness could no longer be ignored, and the two excused themselves. Junkrat was still busy demolishing his plate of gifted sweets, lifting a hand in a distracted little farewell as Mei ushered them to the door…and found that two more guests were already waiting there. Winston and Bastion were lurking, at least as much as two enormous creatures were capable of lurking. Mei blinked at them both, then smiled and bade the others farewell before inviting them in.

Junkrat froze mid-chew in the kitchen, gaze turning poisonous as citrine-yellow eyes darted to the omnic and stayed there, his hackles clearly raised. Mei shot him a look that was both warning and pleading. To his credit, he grumbled but remained silent, still watching where Bastion averted its gaze quickly and tried to duck down behind its simian companion.

“Winston, Bastion!” Mei shepherded them into the center of the room, pushing a table and chair out of the way to make room for them. “How are you both?”

“ _Doo-da-da-weewoo,_ ” Bastion said, gesturing wildly. “ _Wooweoo bee-doo-wee, beep boop._ ”

“We um, we just wanted to see the newest member of Overwatch in person. We can leave, though. We don’t want to wake her.” Winston adjusted his glasses, peering at the drowsy bundle in Mei’s arms.

“I was just going to put her down for a nap, but I’m sure would like meet the rest of her science team for the first time. We’re still deciding on a name—” She narrowed her eyes across at Junkrat when he tried to cough the words ‘Commander Crunchface’ without her noticing, before turning her smile back to her visitors. “But she’s so excited to meet you both!”

Winston lowered his immense shaggy face down to peer at the little girl, who seemed completely nonplussed as to the sudden presence of a very large hairy black blur in front of her face. The simian scientist offered her a toothy grin all the same. “Hi there!”

“ _Beewoobeedee woop_.”

Mei hefted her a little. “She’s giving you both a very sleepy hello. Hello, hi!”

Junkrat stood watching, yellow eyes narrowed as he slowly took another menacing bite of feteer.

“Are you settling in all right?” Winston sat back, huffing on his glasses and shining them on his pocket cloth. “If you need anything at all, just alert Athena. Or come speak to me directly. I’ll always make time. Do you need more room? Extra facilities? More supplies or clothes?”

“No, no! You’ve been more than generous already. We have plenty of room. It’s a lovely place. And everything is perfectly fine. We have more than enough baby clothes and supplies. Enough for ten babies, really.”

“Ah, are you considering having more? Nine children would be extremely—”

From the kitchen, Junkrat coughed and began choking on his pastry. Mei’s eyes widened, uttering a squawking noise that startled the bundle in her arms and made her start whimpering. She shook her head furiously. “Oh! No, no, I just meant— No! I just meant we have plenty of clothes, too many clothes. And w-we’re perfectly happy with just one for now. Plus, she was…She’s a genetic fluke as is. There’s a reason we’ve been calling her a miracle. The odds alone were…” she trailed off, clutching her just a little tighter.

There was another whimper and a squirming from the little one, and Junkrat was suddenly by her side, plucking her up and away. Even as he did so, he glared daggers at Bastion, who quietly slid behind Winston again. “Right, right, my prawn’s gettin’ fussy! I’m just gonna go put ‘er down for some naptime. You all right here, Mei? You sure you’re all right? ‘Cos if not…”

“I’m fine. No, it’s fine. You go on,” she nodded quickly, a little relieved as they both vanished into the bedroom and shut the door for good measure.

“ _Boo-doo-woo?_ ”

“It will be fine, Bastion. I know how he can be, and I know why. But you and I are still friends no matter what. And I’m sure you and her will be too. Science team victory forever!”

“ _Weeet! Weewoo!_ ”

Winston cleared his throat politely, drawing forth a wrapped box that she had not noticed before. “And we as the science team wanted to show our support! I did some research on protocol for handling infants in this environment. You’ve been moved to this room, which is much better for quiet…other than, er, certain circumstances.” He coughed. “Human infants sleep for over sixteen hours a day and need feeding extremely frequently for the first months of their life—”

“Extremely frequently,” Mei muttered.

“And we want to make sure that she has the correct nourishment to grow and flourish here. So we got you this.”

“Aw! Winston, you didn’t have to!” She flushed happily, taking the box and sitting down with it on her lap, tearing at the paper. “Thank you so much. Both you and Bastion. Everyone’s been so kind to me, and it’s so generous f—” Her words died in her throat as she opened the flaps, staring down with her mouth open at what lay inside.

Winston blinked owlishly at her, Bastion shyly peeking around him. “This one received stellar reviews and comes highly rated! And nutrition is important for a growing brain. Er…You seem a little surprised. If it’s not to your liking, I can procure other—”

“No!” She said, voice shrill before she cleared her throat and lowered it quickly. “No, no, that’s really very thoughtful of you. I just wasn’t expecting a gift at all. And this is so…” She lifted the box out of its wrapping, a pamphlet falling into her lap. “I-I guess I just wasn’t expecting a…a-a-a new breast pump. B-but you’re right, her nutrition is really important and it’s such a thoughtful gift, so…Yes, thank you so much!”

She stared down at the breast pump box, trying so extremely hard to keep her face from turning red.

Winston looked pleased. “Oh good, we’re very glad. I know our presence can make certain individuals uncomfortable so…we shall reconvene later? Perhaps in a few weeks, you’ll be able to attend our science unit meetings again? And this should ensure that she can still be properly fed while you’re away. And again, if you need anything at all…”

“Nope!” she squawked. “No, everything is wonderful here and I’ll keep you updated on how everything is going. Thank you again for this great gift!”

“No trouble at all. We look forward to seeing you back, Mei.”

“ _Deeweet!_ ”

Mei very quietly nudged the breast pump box to the side of the chair and out of sight, standing to usher them out. Bastion trilled a farewell as they went, wrist joints clicking as it waved all the way down the hall until she shut the door. She put a hand to her forehead as she leaned her back against it, shoulders shaking in mortified laughter. It had, in its own way, been a genuinely kind and thoughtful gift. But she had also just been given a 5-star breast pump by a moon gorilla and an amnesiac robot, wrapped in Little Bo Peep decorative paper. It was a very strange day.

She carefully opened her bedroom door, finding Jamison flopped in the armchair with his leg and peg crossed and propped up on the bed, fiddling with a phone game. The prawn was laying awake but entranced by the holographic displays shifting colored lights above her, gurgling to herself and occasionally kicking her limbs as if wanting to reach up for them, though still unsure about this whole ‘controlling a body’ thing.

“I didn’t say nothing to the bot!” Rat said, grumbling curses under his breath. “Wanted to go off like a frog in a sock but didn’t. You noticed I didn’t start nothing?”

“I noticed. Thank you.”

“Saw they had a box. What was the gift? A banana? Peanut butter? Omnium explosion?”

She froze, eyes darting, but luckily he was too engrossed in the fruit-pop game to notice. She busied herself above the crib, turning away. “No! No, it was a completely normal and not-strange gift. It was just, ah…more baby supplies? And be nice. And thank you again for being polite enough to excuse yourself. Oh look at that, I think she’s hungry again. It’s almost lunchtime anyway.”

“Yeh yeh, I’ll go heat something up for us. Who wants spicy noodles! Let’s see, that’s Mei, myself, aaaaand…Prawn? Oi, prawn, you want some spicy noodles? Speak on up!” He demanded of the little girl, who crossed her eyes and stared at the hologram horsie galloping above her. “No? None for you? It’s tits for you again? Heh, who woulda thought?”

He went silent for a moment, though Mei could not help but notice that he didn’t get up to start making noodles, nor were his fingers moving to play the game. He seemed to be deep in thought, before his brows furrowed and he turned to face her. “Don’t s’pose old Roadie got in contact with you instead of me, by chance? Like, maybe he gave you a call while I wasn’t about or some such?”

“Roadhog? No, he’s not spoken to me. Why? Is everything all right?”

“Just…dunno. He’s not come by to see her at all.”

“Angela did say she wanted us to keep her at home for a bit until everything was clear, and we told everyone as much?”

“Yeah, but Roadie’s never precisely been a stickler for the rules. Was really weird that he went off on that Dorado mission without telling me, too. But he’s back now! So why’s he not come by? His best mate just had a miracle prawn against all the odds, and he doesn’t even pop by with a housewarming gift? Doesn’t call either…Don’t he want to see her?”

Mei bit at her lip softly, looking down to the changing lightshow that had entranced their daughter. “We don’t know. Maybe he’ll come by later now that we can receive visitors? Maybe he’s busy? Or he’s…got other things going on?”

“What could possibly be more fuckin’ important than his mate Junkrat’s own prawn!”

“I…I can’t say? We just have to wait.”

“I hate waiting.”

She leaned down, scooping up the prawn once more and holding her to her chest, planting a little kiss to the wisps of blond hair. “Well…sometimes things are worth waiting for? Why don’t we just eat some lunch together and take a little break from the visits? I mean, if you have any room left from eating an entire plate of feteer, that is. You better have left me some!”

“I did! A little bit. Uh, just gotta stop me from eating that little bit. I’ll put it somewhere until I forget about it, but then it’s on you to find it again before I can. And you know me, love, I’m always hungry. Who wants spicy noodles!”

* * *

Mei sighed, picking at the extra vegetables she’d added to her bowl of noodles, and occasionally stealing glances at Junkrat’s own bowl of red-hot sauced noodles, flecked with dark spices. She grumbled to herself and plucked at another wad of spinach. “Not fair. I miss really spicy food.”

“Sorry, lovey. Only a little shake for yours, just like you said. Now if it was my tits in question, I’d eat spicy noodles anyway. Gotta acclimate the prawn to spicy food early, right? What better way than spicy right from the tits!” He shoved another forkful of wet noodles into his maw, red sauce smearing his chin. “You want some of mine?”

“No, I can’t. And as nice an idea as is to be…secreting chili oil? I think I’ll just stick to the diet.”

“Your loss! Oh, by the by, my mates are swinging by this arvo. Lu’s back from some concert or other, Hana had gone with him. They’re already planning a prawn party for us at some point, dunno. But they’re gonna drop in to see her…You sure Roadie’s not called?”

“No. But Zarya did. She’s coming by later too.”

“Ugh.”

“Jamie.”

“Fine. But no arm-wrestling my prawn! At least not until she’s more established in her extreme sports training regimen!”

“I’ll remind her.”

They finished their meals, and Junkrat retreated back to his pram heist battle plans while Mei nursed their girl and tried to catch up on a backlog of overdue climate research. Occasionally the junker would giggle to himself at some humorous detail or other, scribbling in the margins while he talked his plans over with his prawn, who showed her support by spitting up on Mei’s shoulder and then soiling her diaper.

Lucio and Hana showed up later in the afternoon, heralded by a rhythmic knocking on the door while Junkrat shot across the room like a one-legged missile to buzz it open. He set upon them both with impossibly long arms, drawing them both in in an anaconda grip as he shook them enthusiastically to and fro.

“Yeah yeah yeah! Get in here, mates!” He dragged them bodily into the apartment, one under each arm as they all but dangled from his grasp. “Been waitin’ all bloody day for you to get back! She’s been rarin’ to meet you! Mei, they’re here!”

“Hi Jamie. Hi Mei,” Lucio managed a muffled greeting from the crook of Jamison’s arm, finally prying loose a moment later and smoothing his rumpled shirt, holding up a large stuffed frog in front of him like a shield. “Sorry we’re late!”

“Heol! Aaagh! Jamie, get off!” Hana protested more loudly, prodding him hard in the ribs until he finally released her too. “There was just a little delay at the airport, we still came as soon as we could. Oh hi Mei! I want to talk to you later but I think Jamie’s going to literally explode if he doesn’t show the shrimp-girl off right away.”

“That’s okay! He’ll always find some reason to explode,” Mei agreed, taking the frog from Lucio and setting it next to her in the chair.

Junkrat hobbled over to scoop up his prawn, holding her against one shoulder as he rounded upon the others and leaned down from his massive height so they could see. The prawn herself was less than impressed and scrunched her face, uttering a few gurgling protests at being moved, squirming and weakly socking him in the chest for his troubles.  
  
“See that? She’s a scrapper, she is,” he crowed proudly. “Right outta the womb and ready for a biffo. She’ll be the new Queen of Junkertown before you know it.”

Hana’s expression softened, clasping both hands. “Look at her hair! Look at her nose! Look at her little boooow! Awww! Can we touch her?”

Junkrat nodded, standing there with a wide and rather stupid grin on his face while they fussed and cooed over his little one. Lucio laughed aloud as he pressed a finger into her palm, watching her tiny fingers reflexively grasp onto it and hold. Hana had, as always, pulled out her phone and snapped photo after photo, before grabbing onto both of the boys, pulling them all inward and yanking Junkrat down with the rest of his miniscule-height friends.

“Selfie! Selfie!”

Lucio opened one arm. “Mei, you gotta get in here too, girl! Come on!”

Mei smiled a little before lifting from the chair and rushing to join them, pulling into the pile of bodies and limbs as they faced the camera.

Hana counted down. “Okay, soft voices everyone! One, two, three, kimchiiiiii!”

“Kimchiiii!”

The prawn still looked startled at the noise, then scowled and scrunched her face up during the next photo. “Aaaangh!”

Junkrat shrilled a laugh, pressing her face back to burrow into his neck as he held her back aloft. “You tell ‘em, little love.”

“I’ll print this out later and then Lucio and I can sign it. To our brand newest fan ever! And then a little drawing of a shrimp,” Hana said, scrolling back through her collection. “Miracle Prawn is a great name for a gamer tag, too.”

“And and and,” Lucio added, “I’m working on an exclusive new track. It’s a soft beat I’m dedicating to you guys, and her. It’s a work in progress, but I’m naming it after her…Camarão Milagroso.”

Mei sighed, throwing her hands up. “Zuòjiā! She’s going to have a real name!”

Junkrat looked up sharply. “Commander Cr—”

“ _No!_ ”

“Mei’s still needing to come around to proper naming conventions,” he said smoothly aside to Hana, who only nodded sagely. “But she came around to the miracle prawn thing, so I’m thinking eveeeentually…”

“Jamie, I swear!”

“He’s just trolling you, Mei,” Hana snickered. “At least, I think so. Anyhow, we wanted to invite you guys out for a prawn party later on! You’ve both been stuck on base for ages, so why not kick it and get out for a few hours with us! And Mei, do not not even say you can’t, because we both know Ana and Torbjorn would break down the door for a chance to babysit her.”

Mei bit her lip, reaching up to place the flat of her palm against the baby’s back. “But…that’s so soon! One of us should be here. Jamie, you should go and have fun. But I sh—”

Junkrat struck quick as lightning, snatching her hand up off the little girl and dragging it up to his lips, placing wet kisses to her knuckles. “No no no no no.”

“Agh!”

He pinned it against his cheek, so tall that the motion nearly dragged her to the tips of her toes, grinning down at her. “Come on, darl. Would just be a few hours at most. D’you even know how itchy I am to get off base for a bit? And you’re coming with, and Nan can watch the prawn. She’s a capable sort of lady. Can sleep-dart the prawn too, if she starts getting too rowdy!”

“Don’t sleep-dart my baby!” Mei protested, even as she started laughing. “That’s not comforting at all!”

“Mei, come with us! Peer pressure, peer pressure!” Hana chanted from off to the side.

“It’ll be fun.” Lucio wrapped his arms around Hana’s neck, leaning his weight on her. “We just want to get you out for a few hours, maybe have dinner or see a show or something. Come have fun, then we’ll head right back. Promise ya.”

“Well…I guess maybe a few hours off base might be nice? But they’ll have to be very quick hours. And we’ll need to make sure Miss Amari agrees first. And I have to make sure she has everything she needs here. And that she has all the numbers for emergencies. And that there’s enough milk and—”

“She says yes,” Junkrat said abruptly, pushing in front of her. “That’s a yes! We’re in. Just let us know when you guys get free, and we’ll go have a bash about town.”

Both Hana and Lucio cheered, though the latter of them soon lifted a hand and backed towards the door. “Sounds great, you guys. And I’m glad we finally got to meet the shrimp, but I haven’t had a chance to unpack from the trip. Hana too.”

“Yeah,” Hana groaned. “And I need to sort through that new merch. Listen, we’ll call back tomorrow or something after we sort through things a little more. And then we can decide where to go for the weekend. Mei, put on your dancing shoes. Jamie, put on your…uh, I guess, one shoe?”

“You got it, mate.”

“I can’t believe I got peer-pressured, but I guess it might be good for us. It has been a few weeks,” Mei said thoughtfully. “But..not for too long, okay?”

“Promise,” Lucio said, crossing his heart before taking Hana around the waist and nudging her towards the door. “We’ll check you guys later!”

“Bye, Mei, bye! Jamie! Shrimp!”

They exited, and Junkrat watched them go, rocking the little girl against his shoulder. “Ta!”

There was a sudden silence, filled only by the gentle gurgling of the baby as she stared blankly at her father’s face. Mei stood back, brows knitting as she turned to face them. “Has it really been that long since we went out? I guess…time has been a little strange, with the feeding and not sleeping and everything else.”

“Lookit, darl. Nobody loves my prawn more’n I do, but we been cooped up for weeks now. Can barely even go for a stroll without having to hurry back, thinking you might need help. S’gonna be good, have a night out with the mates again without worry.”

“I guess I didn’t even realize.” She padded back over to him, wrapping her arms about his scrawny waist as she nestled in on the other side of his ribs, across from the baby. “Sorry, sorry.”

He looped his mechanical arm around her, both arms full of his most favorite girls. “S’alright! Gonna have fun, you n’ me. And the prawn is stronger than you think, she’ll be fine. Though, uh, think she might be getting a bit cranky at the mo.”

“Well Zarya should be by soon. We’ll let her see her for just a quick moment and then let her sleep.”

Zarya did arrive soon enough, ducking into the door before it had opened fully and sweeping Mei into a hug that took her off her feet while Jamison glowered in the background. Though unlike with Bastion or the other omnics, he felt no need to retreat. In fact, he'd be caught dead before he retreated from his Russian nemesis. Though Zarya and Junkrat shared an open animosity towards one another, it was of the sort where neither one backed down, and they would all but seek each other out just to have the last word in their never-ending quarrel. Most often, it just left Mei irritated with the both of them.

Luckily for her, Zarya seemed more interested in the baby than the man holding the baby. She barreled forward, leaning down to peel the prawn’s blanket away from her chin, inspecting her with a grin. “Such a pretty thing! So this is Little Mei?”

“ _And_ Little Junkrat, yeh. We decided to go halfsies,” Jamison muttered snidely.

“Hm. I see she has the light hair. Heh, I will teach her how to dye it when she is older? Just like Aunt Zarya.”

He bristled. “Now you just hold the phone—”

“M-maybe we can worry about dying her hair when she’s in her teens?” Mei spoke up quickly, fluttering around them both. “That’s a while off, so let’s not get carried away…”

“I am just happy to see you, it has been so long. And now I finally meet the little one. I am so happy for you…both.”

Junkrat looked vaguely surprised, then slowly and hesitantly relinquished his death grip on his prawn. “Oh. Well, er…”

Zarya pressed a finger into the little girl’s fist, watching her fingers clench around it. “Ooooh! So strong!”

Rat nodded eagerly. “That’s my prawn! She takes no prisoners.”

“Reinhardt had best watch himself. We are both coming for him!”

Mei blinked between them, almost startled at how agreeable the both of them suddenly seemed. But unfortunately, the little girl had already had her fill of visitors. Her world had been shattered by the discovery that the world contained more people than her mother and father, and the steady stream of outsiders and disruption of routine had made her grumpy. Even while her father and the newest pink-haired visitor were bonding over her, she had started to squirm and whimper in protest.

Junkrat was too distracted to notice at first. “It’s going to be cricket for her, I’m telling ya. Or rugby.”

“Tchuh! With this champion’s grip? It is a crime if she does not go into wrestling.”

“Um,” Mei said, hesitant to reach between them for fear of ruining their only friendly interactions thus far. “She seems a little—”

“May I hold her?” Zarya asked, not hearing.

Junkrat looked briefly conflicted again, but relented with surprising quickness. “Huh. I guess…Yeah, arright. But mind the head, she’s got a great big bonzer of a head. Easy does it…”

“Eeeengh!” The little girl warned them a little louder. But Zarya was already cradling her in both massive arms, and she was being held against the scratchy cloth of a bosom that was definitely not her mother’s, and suddenly her nose was being rubbed against a stranger’s.

“Look at you, little kroshka! A-gu-gu-gu-gu.”

“Aaaahhh!” The prawn looked startled, her face suddenly screwing up and she opened her tiny lips as if to start crying again… And then a torrent of fluid white spewed from her jaws, almost projectile and airborne as she spat up directly into the woman’s face.

Zarya barely stifled a bellow, pinching her mouth shut as she all but shoved the milk-sopped baby back into Junkrat’s arms while Mei gasped aloud and started apologizing, hurrying over to start cleaning her with the nearest rag. And the whole time, Junkrat uttered a hyena-like cacophony of laughter that rang clear even above the miracle prawn’s wailing. True, he had almost been getting along with Zarya only moments before, but he was never one to let a moment of misfortune pass by, and howled at her expense.

Mei shot him a glare, still patting at Zarya while she tried vainly to clean her face and chest. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! Here, let me help!”

Zarya finally peeled her lips apart enough to answer, expression flat. “…Spasibo. Yes. I believe she takes after her father, thank you.”

Leaving the two to clean up, Junkrat limped off with the prawn back to their makeshift bedroom and nursery. Still giggling madly to himself as he peeled the dirty clothes off her and started wiping her down. She only scowled up at him all the harder and explained her actions with a shrill “Nngah!”

“Too right! Champion shot, that was. And right on the perfect target and everything.”

“Eeeh!”

“Champion Spitter! Who’s my little spitter! Who’s daddy’s best prawn? Attagirl! Let’s just enjoy this before your mum comes in and gives me a good earbashing.”

“Baaah.”

He only laughed again, tickling her sticky belly as she tried out another random smile, though it made it seem as if she was as pleased at herself as he was. His grin widened.

“Yeah, you’re mine all right. Hell of a way to introduce yourself to the world, eh? Everyone’s gonna know who you are. I mean, soon as we finally set a name for you, of course. And when you finally earn your junker name. But t’me?”

“Mmmah.”

“Yeah, you got it. You’re always gonna be my prawn.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Are you sure we have everything?” Mei pushed her glasses back up her nose, brows knitted fretfully as she began clicking rapidly at her tablet once more. “Powders, lotions, meds…What about diapers? What if she gets sick and you run out of diapers? I’ll order more diapers. And formula? Once the stuff in the refrigerator is gone, what if she doesn’t take to the formula? Or maybe she doesn’t like that brand? What if she gets hungry and she won’t eat and I’m not here? She’s not old enough, I’m not supposed to leave her alone yet! Should I cancel? Here, I’ll call Winston. I’m canceling—”

Junkrat shot her an irritable look. “She won’t be alone. Fuck’s sake, darl, you got any confidence in me at all?”

“No! I mean, yes! I mean, I didn’t mean it like that! But it’s just such a long time and she’s just getting over her first cold, and why does it have to be now?” She reached up to where the baby’s tufted blond head lay slumped against her father’s chest, asleep and blissfully ignorant to her mother’s ongoing tempest. “Can’t they find someone else for this stupid summit? I should be here…”

Junkrat had replaced his usual bomb-holding harness with a baby-holding type instead. It was a lot bulkier than what he was used to, more used to the weight of a RIP-Tire on his back than an infant on his chest, and instead of loose wires or jagged metal scraping against his ribs he had to worry about curious little hands or the occasional foot to the gut. Also the prawn tended to explode even more randomly than his old bombs and it usually smelled a lot worse. But for now she was snoring and breathing very gently against his collar bone, where she’d apparently inherited her mother’s ability to sleep through anything short of a nuclear blast, as Junkrat had to pry Mei’s hands off her as gently as he could.

“S’only a week and you’re a bloody guest of honor and whatnot. The suits are gonna be expecting you to talk about the climate-whatevers. Come on now, you’ve been just as cramped as I’ve been for the past few months. You think I can’t handle my girl on my own for a few days? She and I are gonna have a blast!”

“That’s what I’m worried about!” Mei protested again. “No blasts while I’m gone.”

“You’re no fun at all. Your mum’s no fun, is she? Here I was, planning on showing her how to build a bomb-wheelie, throw ourselves a baby kegger, have a few beers, rob a few banks… Oh come on! Don’t give me that look, you’re doing the look again! Listen, you can call every single day or send Nan to check up on things if that’ll calm you down. Everything’s gonna be fine. I keep telling you I can do this. I’m her da, after all. You go take care of things there, and I’ll take care of things here, yeah?”

“Ana will want to check in on Thursday. And I said I’d only call once, halfway through the conference. I promised. Are you sure you’ll be okay, though? I-it’s not that I don’t think you can do it. It’s just…I won’t be here for her. This conference is all the way in America. I’ll be so far away from you both, and I’ve never been away this long. What if something happens, and I can’t…? I can’t lose anyone else…I can’t lose her…She’s got to be okay. You both have to be okay.”

Junkrat’s scowl softened, snatching up her hand and placing it to his jaw. “Lookit me. D’you honestly think I’d let anything happen to my own prawn? This one, snoring away right here without a care in the world? You’ll be back before you know it and she’ll be none the wiser. And blimey, it’s not like I don’t have the whole damn population of Overwatch on the other side of the door. Nan’s going to be buzzing around, Angelface is back in two days, and Roadie’s…” His expression went dark again. “Well, guess we’re not counting Roadie anymore.”

Her palm cradled his cheek, soft and cool as he leaned down into it. “I know it bothers you,” she said. “But you just have to give him time. I keep saying he must have his own reasons? We can’t press him.”

“You know the only time he saw her? You know the only damn time he’s bothered to show up, is when you were popping her out. And after that he fucked right off! Surprised he’s still even around at all. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? I try to employ the man, give him a better life and new opportunities and whatnot, and this is how he repays me! S’only through the kindness of my tender heart that I haven’t fired him already! It’s pink slips all the way down, that’s what it should be!”

Mei sighed, eyes rolling upward briefly. “Okay, now we are both acting a little irrational. Just, please be careful while I’m gone, okay? Call anyone if you need to, even if you don’t think you need to. If you need help, it’s okay to need help.” Her tablet beeped and she tapped it again, tucking it away and patting herself down. “Oh no, my flight’s here! That’s so soon! Just…be good, both of you. Promise?”

“Yeah, promise and all. C’mere.” He turned awkwardly to the side, opening one arm and leaning down to plant his lips to hers…and then needing to practically pry her off the baby again, when Mei’s kisses were making her make little noises and threatening to wake her up. “We’re both gonna be fine, you’ll see! You go do the thing, and these days are gonna fly right by. We’ll see you in a week.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mei!”

“N-no, no, I’m sorry! Sorry. I’ll see you in a week. Take care of things while I’m gone. Bye bye, zài jiàn!” She hefted her suitcases and hurried off down the ramp towards the base’s docking area. She paused at the bottom, offering a wave. For a moment Junkrat was afraid that she was going to turn around and try to come back again for the third time, but after a dangerously long moment of hesitation she finally grabbed her luggage and bustled out of sight.

Junkrat exhaled after making sure she was actually gone this time, twisting his neck to look down at the slumbering package still strapped onto him. “Bloody hell, you’d think it was a year away. Guess she’s just fretful over you still, d’you think? Well we’re going to show her that everything’s all shine, just the two of us. We can handle it, ay?” He tweaked at her bootied foot and felt it flop limply. “Huh. Unless you’re just asleep for the whole thing, I guess. Come on, let’s get you down in bed proper. And then just think, a whole week with your da! Aren’t you the luckiest prawn in the world!”

* * *

The prawn had taken her nap like a champion, not waking up no matter how hard he hammered and banged in the next room, disassembling a broken cleaner bot that he’d found in the garbage. Even if Overwatch offered him new parts and all the latest up-to-date technology, he still felt at his best when he was elbows-deep in oil and scrap. And afterward he’d even remembered to wash his hands just how Mei wanted. Or at least enough that it wouldn’t leave black fingerprints on the little animal blankies, which was good enough.

But eventually she’d had her fill of naptime and decided to announce her awakening with a racket as usual. No doubt she was hungry, since her main states thus far had been sleeping, shitting, or eating. Junkrat was a good and responsible father who followed the instructions he’d been taught repeatedly, heating up the milk to just the correct temperature and holding her just how she liked before nudging the bottle’s nipple at her squawling mouth.

Usually she was a ravenous little thing with an appetite to match his errant bodyguard, always eager for tits just like he was. But on their very first damn night alone, of course she decided to be a real wombat about the whole thing. No matter how he tried, she refused to take it. It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten fussy about dinnertime, but her mum had always been around to provide her with the source she preferred. But Mei wasn’t here this time. And no matter how he tried to explain it to her, she just wasn’t getting the picture.

He tried again, easing it at her mouth and cursing aloud when she turned away. “Noooo no no, c’mon now. Your mum’s off doing big science-type things. Now I might not have precisely the tits you like, but this is gonna have to do. Now just oooopen up and— Fuck! I mean, not fuck! Not fuck!” He grabbed a nearby rag and wiped at her face as milk slid down her cheek, which only made her cry more. “Okay, you’re making this harder than it’s gotta be. Work with me here.”

Eventually she did work with him, seemingly deciding at complete random to turn her head and latch onto the bottle like nothing had been wrong at all. What the hell? Normally he enjoyed the work of a fellow agent of chaos, but not when those chaotic whims were aimed at him. It had taken over a half hour just for one feeding, with her fussing and wailing the whole time. But he calmed his jittering and held her steady while she eagerly drained the bottle. Finally.

At least she belched easily enough, when he held her on his bony shoulder and patted the air out of her. She smiled when he pulled her back down, and he liked to imagine that it was a real smile aimed at him, even though he knew better and that she mostly smiled when she was farting, which was…yep, that was exactly what she was doing. He sniffed, then coughed and held her out at arms’ length. “Aawugh! Right outta both ends on that one! That’s definitely from your mum’s side. Now secret between you and me, lovey, your mum’s got some rank ones, real bonzers. Think it’s from all the vegetarian slop she insists on eating. That adorable sweetie pie exterior she’s got, it’s all just cloak and dagger to hide it when she rips gas, so you don’t suspect the source. I’m onto her, though, you’ll see.” 

“Nnhg!” the prawn protested, starting to fuss again before he popped a rubber dummy into her mouth. She calmed somewhat, so focused on the pacifier that she didn’t seem to notice that she was socking herself in the cheek. Attagirl. He waved away the smell and carried her off back towards her chair, strapping her in and adjusting her blanket so she’d be comfy while she sucked the dummy and watched the proceedings. 

“Your mum also seems to think I can’t do this. Imagine,” he said, diving back into the guts of the cleaner bot with both hands. “I know I ain’t— I know I can’t always remember things exactly. But still! Bit shit, really, thinking I can’t look after you. You’re just as much mine as hers! Half junker, after all. Of course I can handle you.”

She punched herself in the face again and crossed her eyes.

“Exactly! Memorized everything, wrote it all down, put reminders up, even agreed to let Nan come check in halfway through. It’s all a bit thick for my liking, but what else can I do? Can’t get mad at Mei for it. Just worries for ya, all the time. Worries for me too. Says she can’t lose us no matter what. I dunno, makes my ribs hurt when she says it.” He reached in and tore out a connecting rod, beginning the delicate process of dismantling its smaller bits. “D’you think that’s weird, how something can physically ache like that? Is that what heartbreak feels like? Or is it maybe just the nerve pains again?”

She snuffled and made a wet noise that sounded almost Hog-like.

“Good point. Guess we just gotta prove we can both do this no problem, ay? I’m not gonna forget anything and you’re probably just going to sleep for most of the week anyway. You just gotta eat, shit, and maybe grow a few kilos. Maybe take it easy on the shitting part, though? Not to offend, love, but between the gas and the nappies, you’re basically a biological weapon in a onesie. But no worries! Me and you, right? Who’s gonna be my good girl while mum’s away!”

She coughed and the dummy clattered onto the ground with the sound of hollow plastic. Without even looking, he paused where he was screwing the panels apart on the cleaner bot to sweep it up, wiping it down before he distractedly replaced it in her tiny mouth. He went to sort through the big screws again, when he suddenly sat up very straight and his yellow eyes widened.

“Wait, I—”

“Mmmmnn!” The prawn uttered a whimper behind him, and something was wrong.

Rat whirled around from where he had started to prod the rubber dummy at the opening of the bot’s panels, still holding it in his hand. A large metal bolt screw was resting on his little girl’s bib, where it had just rolled down her chin. He’d been holding the wrong fucking thing. He’d just stuffed a fucking bolt screw into his daughter’s mouth. Thank fuck she’d had more sense than him and had spat it back out.

“SHIT! Fuckshitno! No no no no!” He threw everything aside, metal clattering in all directions, snatching up and hurling the offending screw across the room like a grenade. The prawn’s eyes widened at the noise and she promptly started wailing again, a smear of black on her smiling yellow duckie bib. He wiped at it desperately, fumbling to unstrap her from her chair as he ran her to the kitchen sink, scooping up water to try and clean her chin. “No no no! It’s fine! I got you, you’re fine, it’s all fine!”

She began screaming harder at the sensation of icy water, and his metal hand all but tore the handles of the sink off as he tried to warm it, trying to stick his flesh hand under the faucet since it was the only one able to feel temperature, but then the water went from too cold to too damn boiling hot for prawns. He yanked her back away from the sink, holding her up to the light and inspecting her open mouth for grease while she wailed right into his face.

Small emergency, but she looked clean. And at least she hadn’t swallowed the fucking thing… Mei would’ve had his head on a goddamn platter, and that was only if he didn’t do it himself for hurting his own little girl. That had been too fucking close. But hardly unusual for someone like him, a colossal fuck-up of a junker who should never have had a kid in the first place. No wonder Mei didn’t believe in him being able to—

He shook his head clear, nerves rattled even as he tried to paste his grin back on. Pulling her up against his chest, he rocked and patted her and crooned her little nonsense songs, her cries going muffled as she scowled and flailed a tiny little clenched fist at him. What a scrapper. He probably deserved those tiny punches.

“Shhh shhh shhh, was just one little mistake! Everyone makes mistakes! It was just…one teeny one, right? And you’re a canny one, you knew better. Smarter than your da, aren’t you?” He patted at her fluffy yellow head, trying to rock her. “We’re not gonna tell Mei about this. I’ll be more careful, swear it. Just gotta get me head on straight, sort through me thoughts. Won’t happen again. Come on, there’s a good girl, she’ll be apples, ssshh shhh!”

She seemed less than convinced, and the rocking only seemed to upset her more. Her sobbing continued, only getting louder in pitch and ferocity. Somewhere in the other room, a timer chimed and began playing a happy tune, indicating it was time to try and feed her yet again. He limped for the fridge, and the prawn stopped crying and abruptly smiled up at him. It was an evil smile, just like his but without any teeth. An extremely foul smell began to emanate from her diaper, even worse than before. This time it smelled…solid.

With that business done, she promptly started crying again.

Junkrat started to have his doubts.

* * *

Roadhog sat slumped in the depths of his sofa, surrounded by cushions and pachimari toys scattered around him. Licking one broad thumb, he separated the paper pages of his book. It was going a little dog-eared, but that’s how he preferred them. Mei had tried giving him one of the computer books, which she said could hold thousands upon thousands of books at one time, or even read them to him if he liked. But he had always declined. He was usually forced to listen to Junkrat talk for hours at a time and found the silence an escape. And he liked old books— real books. He liked the smell and the feel of the paper. He liked the tactile nature of them and their visual presence. And he especially liked their covers: usually with swooning figures falling all over each other, set in exotic places.

This cover was a good one, too. There was a model-looking woman with curly brown hair and dressed in a brocade dress of some old more-romantic time period, her hands raised to her face in mock-alarm at the appearance of her lover in the window of her castle, his face cast into shadow. Judging by the blurb, Roadhog had already surmised that the secret lover was probably a vampire or some such. Vikings, bodices, and time travel were possibly involved too, he wasn’t sure yet.

He’d been doing a lot of reading, lately. With Junkrat now indisposed with Mei and their girl, most of Overwatch had seemed to forget his presence. There had been an occasional mission where he’d been tasked with extra muscle, but he was still ‘the bodyguard’ in their minds. Only now he had no body to guard. Junkrat was technically safe, or at least as safe as someone like him could get. Mei was safe. And their little girl… Everybody was safe. Without him, even safer.

He stayed away from family affairs. They weren’t meant for him. Simple as.

It was getting late in the afternoon, sunlight streaming in through the high window of his garage. It fell across him and warmed his old bones, bathing him in yellow light that was nothing at all like the scorching UV rays of the Outback, but just a pleasant glow for him to read his romance novels to. The dehumidifier rumbled and churned in its comforting mechanical way, drying the air to how he preferred it. The smell of drier sheets still emanated from the basket of fresh laundry that the cleaning crew had left that morning. Everything was pleasant…almost too pleasant.

The distant and muffled wail of a child cut through his drowsy contentment like a hot knife through skin and fat. The sound of a baby’s cry soon drowned out everything else in his mind, hardwired into primal instinct like nothing else. It agitated him on a level he could not describe, and it was getting closer. Closer and closer, and louder and louder, until it was right outside his abode.

_Fuck. No._

He pulled on the comforting confines of his swine mask, inhaling a rasping breath of calming hogdrogen from one of the canisters nearby, and he listened in silence. The crying stopped its journey in front of his door and set up shop on the stoop, and he heard a faint rustle and curse before a series of rapidfire poundings rattled the door like gunfire. It was high up, metal against metal, and without any rythym or pattern. That was Junkrat then. That was Junkrat and his baby girl, trying to hail him. The baby, especially, was trying to hail him, with the racket she was putting up that could even drown out her own father. They were here and they bayed for blood and answers outside his door.

“Hog! Haaaaawg! I know you’re in there, Pigface!”

Roadhog remained silent and still and did not respond, waiting for them to leave again.

The pounding and crying continued. “Hog! Roadhog! Get out here! Fine, if that’s how it’s gonna be, we’re… No, no, I’m not yelling at you. Da’s just going to take care of a few things here.” The junker’s shrill voice went low again, or at least as low as Junkrat was capable.

Roadhog waited, even though he knew it was fruitless. And sure enough, there was soon a bang and a puff of smoke from his door’s control panels, as it blew the module from the mechanical interior. It slid open a moment later, and an extremely irate-looking Rat was squatting a distance away from the explosion, holding both hands over the ears of the little girl squirming in the carrier strapped to his front.

He straightened, and even at a glance at a distance, Hog could tell that he was more out of sorts than usual. He was twitching maniacally, his grin was of the stressed gritted sort, his eyes were rimmed in red veins and dark shadows, and every movement was weighted down with the poisonous mixture of exhaustion and caffeine that was uniquely his own. He threw himself forward, hauling a duffel bag along with him that was overflowing with diapers, rags, and bottles instead of bombs and mines. With a snarl, he came limping into the garage home, looking so indignant that it made even Hog almost forget that Rat was the one doing the trespassing.

“Not even gonna answer the bloody door for me!” he said. “As if I couldn’t knock it down in ten secs flat! Would’ve saved me a lot of bother, and now you’ve gone and upset the prawn even more! No no no, da’s not mad at you, darl. Shhh shh shh. Shhh! F-fuck’s sake!”

Roadhog grumbled and set his book down. The peace of the afternoon was now shattered with a baby crying and her father yelling. The smell of soot, ash, and baby powder was noticeable through his filtered mask, replacing the new laundry smell. Even his sunbeam retreated as a cloud passed overhead and blotted out the light, as if to shield itself from the scene down below.

“Hmmn.”

“Don’t you ‘Hrmmm’ at me, mate! Some standover man you’ve turned out to be! Went and scarpered first chance you got, that’s what you did. What’s all that? Left me and Mei and the tot to our lonesomes, barely surviving!”

The little girl hiccuped and waved her limbs weakly from her carrier, still crying.

Hog eyed them both. “Hmm.”

“It’s shit, that’s what it is! That’s what you are! 50% of my hard-earned living expenses, going for what? You’re s’posed to help me! What is it you want, mate?! Is it money? How much do I gotta pay? How much do you want? Uh, pay by the hourly? How much is that? How about your packimacki toy things! What if I got you some of those! Credits? Omnic botcoin investment? What is it you want to be mates again?!”

“Hnnh…It’s not—”

“It’s not enough?! You think now’s the time to drive a hard bargain?!” Rat dropped the bulging diaper bag onto Hog’s coffee table, on top of the papers and books and everything else, leaning down to rifle through it. Toys and pacifiers and a stray bottle came spilling out, rolling across the cement floors. “Here, help me find the thing. I’ll get you a payment right now.”

“…Hrrngh. No. Listen—”

“Just one hour! Just…just one fucking hour!” Rat pulled out one of Mei’s tablets, and Hog saw how his hands were shaking and how much trouble he seemed to be having just navigating through the intro panels, pausing only to swipe a gloved hand across his baby girl’s face when she drooled onto the display.

Hog watched him try at it for a few moments before he finally rumbled his question. “Rat.”

“Yeah?!”

“When did you sleep last.”

“Huh?”

“Sleep.”

“Uh. How long’s Mei been gone? What day is it? Uh…three? Yeah, probably about three days ago.”

“Hmm.”

Rat turned on him, nearly frothing with rage again. “Which is fine! Who really needs sleep, when I’ve got to keep things going so great with my girl! Don’t give me those disapproving piggy eyes behind that mask, I’m wise to you! Three days is fine! …Or has it been four? What’s today? Shit, is this when Nan’s checking in?!” He spun in a lost circle. “You got to tell Nan I got this under control. I…I might’ve made a few mistakes here and there, with the prawn. But look at her, Hog! She’s still in one piece! The miracle prawn that you don’t give one toss about! But she’s doing great and she’s right here if you just look at her! See? SEE?!”

“…Yeah.”

“Just give me one hour, that’s all. If you’re still my mate at all, you gotta help me with this. Help me bathe her and whatnot, get that bow onto her head, you know, all picture-worthy to send to Mei. Then I gotta clean things up in the room. Had a little incident with the blender. So I took apart the pump for Mei’s tits, using the parts but only temporarily. Cut my fingers up pretty bad, but cleaned it all up and bandaged it good. Then the prawn sort of exploded on the changin’ table, got to bleach that. Not the clothes bleach, but the one in the white bottle: one’s for clothes and one’s for shit, one’s going to burn her if I wash the onesies in it and gets on her skin, and what if I hurt her?! What if I keep fucking it up and she gets hurt?! Does she look thin to you? I can barely get her to eat like she’s supposed to, just refuses it outright. Takes ages just for me to get her to eat even a little. What if we put on the fluffy outfit to hide how thin she’s getting? Here, help me get her squared away before Nan calls in her report—”

“Rat. Tell Ana you need help—”

“Fuck! No! Are you out of your gourd?! She’ll tell Mei, she’ll tell Mei everything that I’ve done wrong, that I’m a shit dad who never should have been a dad. And Mei can’t think that, not after everything!” He paced from one end of the room to the other, peg leg clacking, offering another rubber dummy to his still-wailing baby and helplessly tossing it aside when she refused it yet again. “D’you know how long I spent convincing Mei that I could do this? That she could leave me with the prawn without me fucking it up? She…She’s got to know I can do this. She’s got to at least think I can do this. E-even if I can’t…do this…” He slumped down onto the overstuffed armchair, lanky body practically melting under the ever-growing weight still strapped onto his front, latching both hands over his bloodshot eyes. “Hog…What if I can’t do this?”

Roadhog was silent for a very long time, breath rasping through his filters, audible over the hiccuping and burbling of his impromptu guests. Behind the mask’s lenses, his eyes swerved downward to the little bundle in her carrier. He’d seen glimpses of it from far away, usually attached to Mei, but even when she caught his gaze, she never approached him with it. Even if he hadn’t told her all of it, he had a feeling that Mei knew why he hadn’t visited them. Not visited _her_ …

This was the first time he’d seen her up close since the day of her birth. She’d been fresh as a newly-laid egg when he’d seen her, barely cleaned and still green around the gills when Junkrat had shown her off from behind the glass. She’d grown a little since then, the ‘prawn’, and was no longer the shrunken and misshapen thing from before. She had more wisps of yellow, hair, soft and thin as goose down, and eyes to match her father’s. But the cheeks and nose and the stern frown was definitely Mei’s, especially when she finally noticed the big blob that was his presence and she hiccuped and stared up at him in a very accusatory way.

“Bbbwaaaa,” she said.

She didn’t look anything like the one he’d known. That one had been larger, darker-eyed, and with dark hair that had grown in thick right away. That one had been more quiet and more solemn, with a strangely thoughtful gaze for something so small and so new. That one would have had deep thoughts as she observed the world around her, would probably have chronicled it all with the crayons and paper he’d put aside for her for her one day. That one would have sung the song about bumblebees together with him, had already started to try gurgling along with his crooning. That one had only just learned to smile, really smile at his face, and reach for him, and those dark eyes always lit up in recognition with a spark that burned brighter than the white light on the horizon that had scorched her to ashes.

This one was flailing her legs like a kickboxer, snotting and drooling onto her bib, and still trying to focus on the big masked blur that took up her entire vision. He saw the way she squinted, trying to control her eyes and the lids that covered them without knowing how or why. And though she likely couldn’t even see exactly who he was or the danger he presented, she reached out one tiny little hand and flailed blindly in his direction.

“Aaanngh,” she said.

Hog didn’t respond to the gesture, making himself look away as he grunted and leaned down to pick up a rattling toy that had rolled against his boot. Placing it back on the table, he finally went to set aside his novel, placing his bookmark between the pages. “Hm. Can just call Ana. She’ll sort you out. She knows about—”

Junkrat suddenly uttered a snore from where he had collapsed in the armchair, his hands still over his face in exhausted despair. Hog grumbled aloud, eyes rolling skyward behind his lenses. It wasn’t the first time that Rat’s poor sleeping habits had led to narcoleptic tendencies, but this time he couldn’t truly be irritated at him. This wasn’t from too many nights of shitty coffee and crumpled plans, but from desperately trying to attend an apparently-capricious infant on his very first foray being left alone.

It had been many decades ago, but Hog could still remember how fucking terrifying that had been, to be left alone with something so precious but so fucking fragile. There had been no sleep to be had then, either, when the baby had gotten sick while her mother was so far away, and he’d been Mako. Every cough or whimper she made had been like ice in his veins, barely able to grab an hour or two of sleep in as many days. He could remember being so tired that he’d fallen asleep rocking her, with the formula heating up on the stove, and had later awoken to the smell of burning milk in the kitchen and her coughing vomit into his lap.

Rat’s exhaustion was from a different source, but Hog knew what it could do to a man. Could drive someone crazy, or at least crazier than normal. Could you make you desperate to try so hard that you only made it even more difficult than before. Could have you run on fumes until you finally could fall apart and break down in the presence of someone you thought you could trust..even though he’d abandoned you weeks ago…

The little yellow-haired girl, the prawn, remained blissfully unaware of the turmoil. Her father had literally collapsed with her still attached to his chest, but that was hardly something she seemed worried about now. She’d become so distracted by the big blurry Hog sitting a few feet away that she’d forgotten to keep crying, and she reached for him again. He watched her. She was trying so hard to control those unwieldy little things that were her own limbs, impossibly small fingers curling and uncurling, trying to grasp and not understanding why nothing was there.

Hog remained very still, still watching her. Her arm lengthened, pushed out as far as she could get it from the confines of her carry-bag. Her cheerful little cartoon-printed onesie had been washed recently, still had little specks of lint and fuzz attached to the elastic around her wrist. She seemed baffled by the very concept of her own hand, her yellow eyes suddenly going into focus as she flexed her brittle little digits again, watching them move because she had wanted them to move. Undeterred by her lack of coordination, she reached out to try and touch the world around her.

The big blurry thing shifted in the far distance and rose upward, and Roadhog very slowly loomed closer. The lenses of his swine mask remained cold and blank, until they were caught in the sunbeam that dared to peek from behind the cloud cover, glowing white and yellow. His ‘face’, the one he had adopted in the wake of the apocalypse, was lit with terrifying clarity. An enormous hand, adorned with metal spikes and scars and chipped black nails, a hand that had crushed skulls and spattered blood and wrung the life out of so many, lifted up in front of her. One by one, his fingers curled, until there was only one thick and crooked index, held forth in front of her.

She smiled, and her tiny hand found his offered finger and closed upon it, gripping onto him.

It destroyed him more than the nuclear apocalypse ever had. Instead of scorching fire and bleached rock and bone, it was soft flesh and gentle warmth and potential, and everything else that had ever been stolen from out of the godforsaken desert he’d loved. It was all the ashes that had once poured out of the little blanket he’d tried to hold in his arms, when he’d found her in the wreckage and ruin of their home. Far greater than the treasure that Junkrat had dug out of the wastes all those fateful years ago, it was everything he’d tried to forget, and the one thing in existence that he’d truly fled from… And here she was, again. Even if it wasn’t _her_ …

Mako sighed, lowering his head briefly and breathing deep.

He reached his other hand to awkwardly undo the straps that attached her to Rat’s chest. The ripping of velcro barely roused him at all, but when Hog started to lift the weight of the baby off of him, he launched out one skinny arm that immediately grappled onto his former partner-in-crime’s vest, the other covetously grasping his little girl back to him. Red-rimmed eyes shot open, teeth bared, and Rat was immediately in Hog’s face and ready to fight to the death.

“I’LL CRACK YA! YA WOT, MATE? YA WOT?!”

The girl started crying again.

Hog grumbled at the ruckus, but relented his grip and slowly lifted both hands in an extremely rare gesture of peace. “Rat. Wake up.”

There was a pause as Rat blinked strangely, his eyes not quite in sync. He wasn’t even truly awake, his reaction born of years of rough living and parental paranoia. Shuddering, the aggression evaporated from his stance, furrowed brows easing. He looked around them blearily, then placed a hand on the baby’s fluffy head and eased back into the chair again as he realized where he was. “Oh, s’just you. Were we doin’ something? Uh, what’s the time, I got to feed—”

Hog upnodded to the protesting prawn. “I’ll take her.”

“You?” Rat sneered in indignant disbelief. “You don’t know anything about sprog-rearin’. Dunno why I even came here. Didn’t know where else to go. There was nowhere else to go. I couldn’t… S’just…”

“I know a little. Give her here.”

Junkrat seemed understandably torn, eying his erstwhile partner with a look that Hog knew well, and knew better than to protest. Down beneath all the exhaustion and madness and radiation, all the scattered pieces of calculating genius scraped together in ways that nobody truly understood— least of all Rat himself. The cogs of his mind were clearly grinding, weighing pros and cons and sorting through delusions and realities. There was too much at stake to make the decision lightly.

Hog couldn’t be sure what led him to finally relent, as metal fingers loosened around the velcro straps of the carrier and his grasp uncoiled from around his precious onesie-wrapped bundle. The way he was looking at Hog was still very far from kind, but still he opened his arms and allowed her to be taken from him. Moving cautiously and slowly, Hog lifted the little girl off her father’s chest and deposited her into the crook of his elbow, folding one massive hand over top of her.

“You got her?” Rat fretted.

“I got her.”

“Hrnnghh! Well…! Huh. Actually handlin’ her all right, I guess. Surprised you’d know anything at all about handling babies.”

“…Used to know someone. He had a little girl.”

“Oh yeh? Is it anyone I know?”

“Not really.”

“You should give ‘em a ring, make introductions. Give my lil’ prawn a new playmate and whatnot! Gal pals!”

“Hm. Don’t think so. Not around anymore…And he wasn’t any good for her in the end.”

“Oh. Well then fuck him, I s’pose.”

“…Yeah.”

“Shame, I guess, about the girl. Probably she and my prawn might’ve been best mates!”

Hog looked down to where the baby was gurgling and mouthing at his knuckle. “Yeah. Think they woulda gotten along.”

Rat watched him like a hawk, not looking down even when he leaned to start undoing the wraps and clamps of his prosthetic limbs. There was a faint buzz as the old nerve receptors powered down and went dead, and Rat gingerly went to ease limbs off the stumps of his leg and arm. They looked red and chafed and raw, a far-too-familiar sight from where he’d worn them for too long without a break. He rubbed at what was left of his forearm, brows lowering.

“Going to explain why you bailed on me and mine, then? It’s been yonks since I spied hair or hair of ya. Mei kept on saying you’d come around in your own damn time…but you didn’t. And she kept saying to wait, I just gotta wait. And I thought maybe Mei was right because Mei’s fair dinkum and she’s right a lot, so I waited…and still you never showed. You never fucking did. And at first I was right cross about it all, but then…I started wondering why.”

Hog glanced up at him but said nothing.

Rat’s eerie gaze remained fixated, pupils narrowed to little pricks of black on yellow. “We’ve bashed around for years, mate— years! And we’ve seen some shit together. How many people have I seen you kill? I watched you face down two of the top brass from Junkertown on your land when they came for me, and you didn’t even flinch. Never seen you scared of anything. So I thought it was something I’d done. But wasn’t that either, was it? Fockin’ hell, how many bullets have I had to pluck from the meat of your arse or run to get them gas cans when you couldn’t breathe? And you changed my sheets and even cleaned out the thunderbucket from that time I got dead-real sick in that shack outside of Dooniwop. Not too many blokes would do that. Probably lots of other times I’ve forgotten, too. We’ve been true blue up until now.”

“…Hmm.”

“So what makes someone like you…” He lifted his remaining hand to point at Hog. “Scared of someone like her?” It tilted down to the little bundle in the cartoon onesie.

Hog looked back down to the girl, still quiet. For a long time he simply didn’t answer, unwilling or unable to put it into the right words. He lifted one meaty shoulder in a rather helpless shrug that did not at all suit someone like the one-man apocalypse. “Hmmmh…”

“It’s not me or Mei, is it? It’s my prawn. You’ve been running scared of my prawn for over two months now, and it’s not because of the crying or the nappies or the spitting up or the baby things. It’s somethin’ else about her…It’s somethin’ that’s happened before her…”

Junkrat eyed him again, in the same way as before. Whatever might have been going on in that strange head of his, this time he wasn’t telling. And when the prawn started fussing and whimpering again from Hog’s arm, there wasn’t time to confront the matter further. At least, not for now. 

There was simply no time. Rat was already stressed back into action, sliding onto the floor and rummaging through the diaper bag until he came up with a smaller pack, digging a bottle out of it. “Put a pin in that for now, Roadie, we’re in the shit. Still got to get her ready before Nan suspects anything or tells Mei I can’t do this. Fuck, she’s cryin’ again, they can’t hear her cryin’…”

“Give it here. I’ll heat it up.” Hog was glad to be distracted from the conversation and held out his free hand, the bottle plonked into his palm.

“Right, right, right. Okay. Go heat that up, I’ll feed her. Not too hot! Then I’ll get her in a bath, wash her arse, put her up in one of those fancy baby dresses Mei likes. Pose her for some slick photography with her favorite roo stuffie, ya know, for proof of life…” He dug his arm about in the bag, growing more and more frantic. “Wait, where’s her roo? Where the hell is the roo! Mei’s gonna see her without the roo and she’ll know I’ve forgotten it and then she’ll start questioning all the other things I forgot and then she’ll think I’ve somehow faked the pictures, like I got a fake baby that I may or may not have made out of some of her extra clothes and some pillowcases just in case anything happened, not that I’m saying anything happened—!”

“Rat.”

“What!”

“Sit down. Gonna go heat this up. I’ll be back.”

“Will ya be back this time?!”

“Yeah.”

“…Will ya?”

“Yeah. I will.”

Rat made a strange noise, pulling the diaper bag into his lap and continuing his search as he collapsed back onto the sofa. Roadhog sighed and trundled off into the kitchen, filling a pot with water and setting it to warm. He’d done it a thousand times, too many years ago, but still remembered the order. He tested the water, dropped in the bottle, and rocked the little girl that was now bicycle-kicking her legs against his chest and not-quite-laughing.

Hog snorted down at her. “Guess we know which side you got that from,” he said, heading back into the den. “Your girl’s going to be a terror one day—”

Junkrat was asleep again, both arms locked around the bag, his face smushed into a pile of baby clothes and the zipper already pressing indents into his cheek, the missing toy kangaroo wedged into the sofa down by his remaining leg. Roadhog stared down at him for a moment, then placed the kangaroo by his pillow and meandered off again, shutting the door behind him. He waited for the milk to heat, watching the timer and only becoming distracted when he noticed a very small hand reaching up for him again.

The prawn was focused on his face, or what had become his face. Adjusting her up along his arm, he allowed chubby little fingers to clumsily grasp at the rim of the mask’s filter, though he felt nothing from their touch. He rasped in a breath, which seemed to startle her for the first time, and he saw how her eyes widened and she looked suddenly offended.

“Don’t think much of that?” he asked.

“Mmmmnn!” she said, still flailing.

He reached up and very gently took hold of her hand, lowering it away. “Hmm. Guess not. Don’t think she would’ve liked it much either. Didn’t like loud noises. Got scared easier than you do…” 

He leaned his head down, undoing the buckles and straps that held the mask onto his head. Its filters hissed as it depressurized and the burn of real air returned with the smell of milk and talcum powder, the scratches and fogged glass of the lenses giving way to almost-clearer vision, looking down at her. Again her eyes tried to focus as she peered back, squinting and furrowing, unfamiliar with the leathery swine-monster above her becoming someone entirely different.

When she reached for him again, he didn’t stop her. Unwieldy little fingers touched the white bristles around his chin, the deep scars and the burns, and the chapped flesh of what was left of his lower lip. This one was still so young, even younger than _she_ had been. He could still remember every moment of it; when she had first learned how to work her hands, how to look between faces, how to smile and laugh, and how to bring her hands together and squeal happily when she heard him singing her favorite songs…like the one about the baby bumblebees…

The timer chimed and he reached to take the milk bottle from the water, wiping it off and testing it on his wrist before transferring her back down into the crook of his elbow. Rat had said that she was being fussy lately, somewhere during his ranting, and Hog wasn’t surprised when she tried to turn her nose up at the offering.

“Hey,” Hog said, the baritone of his voice thrumming deep as she looked up at him again.

He tried to hum, the same tune that his own girl had loved so much— that tune about the baby bumblebees. But he could barely manage a few notes before something old and tired and long-buried lurched in the darkness of his chest and he swallowed the song back down until it hurt, like those bumblebees were stinging him in the throat. He cleared them away with a rumbling cough, briefly placing a hand over his mouth. It had been too many years since he’d sung it, or not enough.

“…Maybe a different one,” he told her. “Know one about the kookaburra.”

Maybe it was the thunder of his voice or the tune about the kookaburra itself, but she seemed entranced when he began to hum. When he offered the bottle again, she stilled her fussing and took it with no more trouble, yellow eyes drifting shut. The bottle steadily drained until she belched against the cloth on his shoulder and yawned with a high squeaking noise like a snared rabbit. He replaced her in the crook of his elbow, and she opened her eyes long enough to smile up at him. Hog almost smiled back. 

But then her smile turned into toothless grin, and she promptly passed gas at him before immediately falling asleep, just as abruptly as her father had in the next room over. 

He stifled a chuckle, leaning his face away. “Eugh…Yeah, that’s from Mei all right. Might need the mask after all.” He tossed the empty bottle aside and stood, heading back into the den for his armchair and his book, and to keep watch while they rested.

* * *

  
Mei trotted up the ramp with her suitcase, and spotted the extremely unmistakable beanpole frame of Junkrat waiting for her. She brightened and waved, hurrying her step with the hovers on her case struggling to rattle after her. “Jamie, zhè biān! Over here!”

One extremely frazzled-looking junker turned at the sound of her voice, his customary grin only able to make it halfway across his face as he opened both long arms. She enthusiastically threw herself into them, and his grip coiled and tightened as he buried his nose into her hair, sighing aloud before he began to plaster her face with irritating kisses while she squealed and batted him away just how he liked. Only then did he rear back up to his full height, keeping one arm draped over her shoulder. “How are ya, darl?”

“It’s good to be back. That was such a long week! Um, n-not that I was worried or anything, I know you said things were fine. I got the little video you and Ana sent of her with her little zebra sweater, so cute! And she took the bottles okay? Was she—”

“Aaah-haha-ha! Nope! Everything was fiiiiine! It’s just…ya know. Prawn’s a vivacious girl and it was…uh. Ya know, she’s kinda got a stubborn streak and I— Uh, maybe you could just not leave again? Ever? Just a joke! But really!” He rubbed nervously at his neck, then blinked when there was a pull at his arm, leaning down to where Mei could plant another kiss on his cheek. Some of the tiredness melted away, his shaky smile steadying. “Ah, heh!”

“I know it must have been hard. It was hard with two of us. I hope you weren’t being too hard on yourself? Like I said, you can always ask for help when you get tired. I know I ended up crying in the bathroom more than once because I was so tired.”

“Mighta been a little more difficult than I’d been crowing. Only a little, though!”

“But…it’s easier with help? I heard you had help?” She lowered her voice scandalously as they walked, looking around as if expecting someone to interrupt them at any moment. “Really? I guess I’m a little surprised that it was Mr. Roadhog. Is everything okay between you two? Was everything okay with her?”

“Honestly, love, I got no idear how it went. Apparently I passed out on his lounger for about six hours straight before he woke me up so I could go get more bottles for her. Was acting all weird about her at first, all…squirrely-like. But when I wake up, she’s fed, burped, changed, and absolutely smitten with the big lug. Ya know, you’d almost think ol’ Pigface has got more experience than he’s let on!”

“W-well, it’s not really our place to… But he was okay with her, is the main thing? She didn’t bother him? And you were able to sleep? It sounds like you might have needed a little break.”

Junkrat turned upon her, wild-eyed. “N-no! No, it was all fine! Didn’t even need to sleep! Who told you that!”

“You did?”

“Well fuck me, then! Yeah nah, I had everything under control! Well, me and maybe a bit of help on the down-low from Uncle Roadie. And the prawn was sheer perfection, not a misstep, absolute angel, definitely didn’t explode a tornado of shit that somehow managed to miss her entire fucking diaper or anything! Speaking of!” He leaned down to snatch up her bag, pushing her in front of him as they rounded the corner. “Think I ain’t the only one what’s happy to see you back.”

Mei’s entire person lit up, even prettier than when his bombs went off. She dropped the handle of her suitcase and broke into a jog, then into a run, right up to the enormous figure of Roadhog, and the cushioned carrier he held in one hand. He upnodded and grunted a little greeting sound, but she only managed a very distracted semi-response before she set upon the carrier with both hands, pulling at straps and plastic buckles until she was finally able to lift the little girl back into her embrace after so long away.

She laughed to herself as she rocked her, covering the little wisps of blond hair with kisses. “Oh no! Nǐ zěn gǎn! You were asleep when I left and you’re asleep when I come back too! Terrible, terrible manners. You could at least say hello.” She pressed another kiss to her forehead, holding her tightly, voice entirely without malice as she scolded her.

The prawn mumbled to herself and stirred but remained asleep through the torrent, sucking on the rubber pacifier, as Mei shook her head and turned up to where Roadhog was peering down at them in his usual silent menace. A quick glance backward saw Junkrat still struggling with the handle to her case, so she took a moment to lean up towards him. “I promised I won’t pry, Mr. Roadhog, honestly I won’t. But I guess I was surprised to see you in those photos with her. I know Jamie won’t admit he was having some trouble with her but… I’m glad he went to find you. I just want to know if you’re okay with her? With everything?”

“Wasn’t in the plan. Was hard. Thought those days were long gone. But Rat needed help. And she’s…” Hog shrugged, rumbling a low sigh before lifting the empty carrier. “She’s all right.”

“Then, thank you. From both of us. Thank you so much.”

There was a loud clatter from behind them. “Ow! Where’s the latch for the hovers! Fuckin’ thing!”

“Oh, here! I’ll get it, sometimes it sticks!” Mei placed one last kiss to the prawn’s head before very carefully placing her back into the carrier, moving to help him where the hover pad had gotten stuck and the entire case now trying to roll around in circles. “No, no, it’s going left, hold it still!”

“Head it off at the pass, darl! It’s goin’ rogue!”

Hog watched them laugh and dissolve into more arguments while their daughter slept through it all, leaning down to strap the little girl back in and cover her snoring body with her blanket again. She might not have been awake for Mei’s reunion, but there would be time later. And Rat was perking up back into his old self again, where he had thrown himself bodily onto Mei’s suitcase and was trying to wrestle the hover port closed again while Mei pulled at his leg and yelled for him ‘not to hurt it’.

They were both looking a little flushed by the time they had straightened it out, and Mei retrieved her suitcase while Rat had firmly wrapped one arm about her once more. When they returned, Hog caught the little glances towards one another, and where Mei was subtly trying to shoo his hand away from her rear. She cleared her throat and adjusted her glasses as her gaze darted to the little sleeper in the carrier, sighing aloud when the prawn only fussed a little at the noise, turned her head the other way, and went right back to sleep.

Hog half-lifted the carrier and made his offer, lifting his head very subtly to Rat. “…She’s asleep. Just ate. Probably going to nap for a while. Could keep her for a bit.” Just as he thought, Mei looked a little disappointed, but he knew she wouldn’t have time to mope for long. He wasn’t entirely sure if Rat had caught his signal or if the younger junker was just being as lecherous as normal, but Rat was quick to seize the opportunity.

“Y’hear that, darl? Prawn’s a champion napper, might be a while. We uh…we got some time? Ya know, I ain’t seen you for a week.” He promptly returned to trying to squeezing at her side and lowered his voice into a hoarse ‘whisper’ that was still audible to everyone around them. “Prawn’s not the only one who’s been looking forward to those tits again…”

“Jamison!” She hissed, before coughing sheepishly and hugging her suitcase like a shield. Likely she would never get used to the junkers’ ‘open’ style of approach. “I-I mean, we shouldn’t inconvenience Mr. Roadhog, and I haven’t seen her—”

“She’ll wake up later on, can get right back on track. But I mean, uh…ya know, if we got time.”

She looked torn. “No, we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t impose…”

Hog snorted and glanced down at her. “Offering. She’s asleep. You got a good sleeper. You got time. Take it.”

Junkrat nosed at her hair, practically salivating. “Oh, she’s gonna take it…”

“JAMISON!” Her face lit up pink. “O-oh! Well I guess…I guess if she’s going to be napping for a while and you don’t mind taking her? Just for a little bit! Um, I guess if…Will you message me the moment she wakes up, though?”

“Yeah. I will.”

Mei offered him a grateful but embarrassed smile, and Junkrat gave him a much more grateful and much less embarrassed smile as well. Mumbling words of both apologies and thanks, she grasped onto Rat’s hand and let him drag her away. Their arms looped around each other in that awkward manner, too tall and too short and determined to make it work despite. Even while Hog watched them go, Rat goosed at her bottom and she slapped his arm, then leaned her head up against him while he laughed uproariously at some joke or other. They turned another corner and were gone, headed back to their home together.

Hog was left alone once more… Or, not alone. Not this time. 

The prawn squeaked out another yawn from her carrier and he glanced down at where she shifted in the throes of brand-new dreams. He placed his finger in her open palm, and her fist curled and closed and held on as she stilled once more. He waited until she was pacified, patiently tucking in the blanket again before lifting up her carrier and heading off back to his own home. It was likely she’d be asleep for a while longer yet, and they had time before everything devolved back into chaos.

“Come on,” he told her. “Gonna stay with Uncle Roadhog a while longer.”

Best to enjoy those moments while they could. They were moments you’d never get back, no matter how much he’d give to have them back again. But he had this, at least for now. And it was all right.

It was all right.


End file.
